IdoNotes (and sleep)

One of the things a mail administrator must understand is Sender Policy Framework or SPF records in DNS. With the advancement in spam filtering, the ability to verify a server is authorized to send email on a domain's behalf is critical. So I wrote a brief introductory article on SocialBizUG.

SPF allows the owner of an Internet domain to specify which computers are authorized to send mail with sender addresses in that domain, using Domain Name System (DNS) records. Receivers verifying the SPF information in TXT records may reject messages from unauthorized sources before receiving the body of the message. Thus, the principles of operation are similar to those of DNS-based blackhole lists (DNSBL), except that SPF uses the authority delegation scheme of the Domain Name System

SPF works for any mail system so deploying it is a must as some recipients are now requiring entries or they block your email.  Read more in the article right here or leave your questions below.

 I even have some links in the article to let you validate your new or existing SPF records.

for this posting



On Monday, July 13th, 2015   by Chris Miller        

As we fight to fix the POODLE vulnerability in all systems, we should know what it is. POODLE stands for Padding Oracle on Downgraded Legacy Encryption . In simpler terms it exploits an older form of encryption your browser may use to communicate with servers.

As long as both the server and the client (web browser) support SSL 3.0, the attacker can force a downgrade in the protocol, so even if your browser tries to use TLS, it ends up being forced to use SSL instead. The only answer is for either side or both sides to remove support for SSL, removing the possibility of being downgraded.

So if an attacker can force your browser down to the older SSL 3.0 then they could cause some problems.  While vendors are hurriedly trying to patch their software, pretty much everyone was still supporting SSL 3.0 on their servers and of course your browsers do too. The only true solution is for both the web servers and the browsers to remove support for SSL 3.0 and force everything to TLS (transport layer security).

You can temporarily disable SSL 3.0 (and prior) in your own browsers for the time being.  Just be warned that if a site you frequentdoe not for some reason support TLS then you cannot get a secure connection once you do this.  Firefox will be making an update in late November under version 34 that removes SSL 3.0.  For now you can manually add a SSL Version Control extension to assist.

Google Chrome can be adjusted by simply changing your shortcut to force TLS as the minimal SSL connectivity.  They will have a Chrome update soon that will address it for the end users.

Lastly Internet Explorer (IE) has a manual way fix you can do today. I could not find a date yet on when they will update to fix the problem but in your Advanced tab and the Security section you can simply click to disable older SSL and make sure TLS is enabled for connections.

for this posting



On Thursday, October 23rd, 2014   by Chris Miller        

I am an avid user of Skype and have let it update itself pretty regularly. Even automatically.  However the Skype 6.21.104 update this week is consuming tons of machine memory. And it continued to grow


So I uninstalled Skype 6.21.104 to go back to an older version.  My choice was the last Skype 5 version I could find of 5.10.0.116 and ran into a new issue

Since yesterday, all versions of Skype below Skype 6.13 for Windows and Skype 6.14 for OS X are blocked and do not allow you to sign in.

There are all sorts of hacks and workarounds to get old versions to go but that was not what I needed.  I wanted to go back at least a few point releases to lower the memory usage again. So this got troublesome.  Skype has the newest version plus the very slick looking beta.  By the way the beta used even more memory as shown here

So I dug around for sites with the older version listed. I was lucky to find the whole list on Soft32.  I went back to 6.14.132.104 and got the following memory results
So for now I will stay on an older version of Skype, even though the new beta was much nicer looking.

for this posting



On Thursday, October 16th, 2014   by Chris Miller        

IBM Redbooks are known as key technical books on deployment to development. IBM has launched a mobile app for IBM Redbooks.
The mobile app is available for both iOS and Android devices.   Continue Reading here" IBM Redbooks launches a mobile app" »

for this posting



On Tuesday, May 13th, 2014   by Chris Miller        

You can also watch the VMWare Fusion 4 video in full HD on YouTube.

I had the opportunity to get a copy of VMWare Fusion 4 to review and I am more than pleased.  I have been an avid user of version 3 on my Macbook for some time, and enjoyed the ease of working with multiple operating systems for demos and testing.

VMWare Fusion Version 4 stepped up it's game with tons of enhancements, speedier graphics and better stability.  Take a look at the video for more.

Note: the links above are Amazon Affiliate links.  I do hope you buy from there :-)

Also,  make sure you keep up with all the product reviews from Spiked Studio on YouTube.

for this posting



On Tuesday, December 6th, 2011   by Chris Miller        

In this May 2011 edition I talk about Lotus' attempt at the Exceptional Web Experience and the following:

* From the Editor: Chris' -0.0123 SOC  
* From the IdoNotes Mailbox: Removing Encryption On a Local Database
* IBM Social Business Toolkit and Wiki
* Quick Tip: Free Sametime Plug-ins
* From the IdoNotes Mailbox: Plug-ins and Updatesite

Make sure you also:

* Register for IamLUG 2011!  The doors are open for attendees, speakers and sponsors.  The event will be FREE for all attendees and is being help Aug 1-2, 2011.

* Register for TackItOn again right after IamLUG.  This full day (paid) event brings Matt White for XPages 201 and Paul Mooney for Lotus Traveler

* Sign up for both the Consultant In Your Pocket and IdoNotes newsletters in the upper right corner of the blog.  Get early notices before the public, webcast information and commentary not found on the blog.  Did I mention the two free whitepapers on DCC and Search in Lotus Notes just for signing up?

for this posting



On Thursday, May 26th, 2011   by Chris Miller        

Recently I have been watching not only my own mail account but the logs of caught spam across a ton of customers.  By domain.  You would not think that GoogleGroups would be getting marked, as people subscribe to them for the most part.  What I am finding is that spammers are now creating GoogleGroups and adding huge lists to them. 

Enterprises for the most part will trust Google as an authorized sender.  So unless the email contains words or other variables to set off triggers, they are getting through.  User's are then blocking the reply-to address or all of GoogleGroups, depending on how they were trained or what type of spam filter they are using.

Even the DomainKey and DKIM are matching for hostname lookups since it is Google sending the email.  The funny thing is you may not even use the address being sent to as a Google account, so removing yourself is even harder.

Most of the senders are technology based companies, so reporting them inside of Google is troublesome to do as well, so you find yourself just marking it as spam and moving along.

for this posting



On Wednesday, March 16th, 2011   by Chris Miller        

A great way to spend a minute and seventeen seconds seeing just how connected the world is.

for this posting



On Sunday, January 9th, 2011   by Chris Miller        

I received a link from a customer to this ComputerWorld article with the title 10 ways SharePoint 2010 will impact your Lotus Notes migration.  The first thing the article does is make a very bold statement:

Over the past five years, many organizations have abandoned their legacy Lotus Notes/Domino environments

What constitutes legacy?  An application that drives their entire business?  An application that is a workflow built over many years to save huge amounts of costs for the enterprise?

So why didn't the companies move these applications?

Their concerns range from the cost of rebuilding applications on SharePoint to uncertainty about whether SharePoint has the capabilities needed

I beleive they catch the main reason right away.  The article goes on to to start the list of how it is easier, or should be.  Even though they list limitations right away.

1. Scalability: It’s not unusual for Notes databases in large enterprises to contain tens of thousands of documents. Organizations attempting to move this content to SharePoint 2007 ran into some severe size limitations on SharePoint lists and libraries. With SharePoint 2010, however, the recommended maximums for many criteria have more than doubled

So right away they admit even with Sharepoint 2010 there is still limitations in large databases.  They even note this about keyword fields into the managed metadata store.  The scaling and ease of migration is not there.

Office integration, their point #3, is a non-issue.  I think John Head has been preaching this for years in his integration sessions.  This already exists inside the Notes and Domino world

4. Offline Capabilities: Although many of us count on continuous internet connectivity and bandwidth, many legacy Notes applications depend on the ability to “go offline.”  Notes is famous for its ability to replicate to your laptop whatever data you need to continue working while unplugged.

They admit Notes is famous for offline capability so Sharepoint tries to cover this with Workspaces.  They taught that it is based on Groove (no defunct in the grand sense) and the same developers that built it for Notes.  Maybe some, but the movement and capabilities have far outgrown what ehy know and can do.

Sharepoint Online makes it presence known in post #5.  Domino has has hosted offerings for a long time from such partners as Connectria, and now LotusLive.  Nothing new here exept competition they had to offer.  Move along.

The rest of the points were design capabilities which Notes has been ruling for years in the RAD world.  Point 9 even tries to promote workflow.  Are they serious?  Workflow comparisons?  Lotus Notes stomps all over workflow.

So it all made sense at the end being written by a Sharepoint migration partner/specialist. that also runs a blog on the topic.

for this posting



On Tuesday, December 28th, 2010   by Chris Miller        

On Wed November 17th, at 10am CST, there will be a webcast covering What's New in Domino 8.5.2 Administration.  After the success of these sessions at DANNOTES in Denmark, it was suggested that is was redone as a Consultant In Your Pocket webcast as well.  It will cover the following:

• Managed mail replicas
• Forced client ODS upgrades
• Domino diagnostic probe
• Administrative accounts for plug-in deployment
• Detecting corrupt databases
• Directory assistance changes
• Miscellaneous changes included!

Head over to the free webcast registration page for the event and get your team signed up!  Remember, it is free and only last just over an hour

for this posting



On Monday, November 8th, 2010   by Chris Miller        

You can also watch the above video in HD on my IdoNotes YouTube channel right here.   A wiki article has been created as well.

After submitting my Lotus Blogger Search Widget successfully to the Lotus Greenhouse Catalog last week (original posting), I was happy to see downloads start.  Then the comments of failure began.  Well after some sleuth work and willing testers, I found the cause and solution which I posted there.  I am more than happy to share those comments and thoughts here as well.  Remember it is not a plug-in, a widget.

In order to successfully download my widget, and future ones successfully, from the Lotus Greenhouse you must do the following crazy steps:

Open your local names.nsf -> Advanced -> Accounts -> greenhouse.lotus.com entry -> edit -> supply missing credentials -> save and close -> restart Notes -> drag widget again successfully

Basically the widget can only be accessed via a username/password even for the xml file.  So Greenhouse attempts to create a local account.  The local account it creates on the fly can not get your web credentials to the Greenhouse site.  So the error is generated.

Apparently Lotus has known about this for at least 8 months since I found a document addressing it from Feb 2010.  No fix, no solution and a bad way to get it.  I will point users to my blog instead for now.

(Update before this got published)  Lotus has acknowledged this is a Notes regression bug under Spr OAGU88XK87 that worked in Notes 8.5 and broke in 8.5.1 and 8.5.2.  This will make it in 8.5.2 FP1 and 8.5.3 but it is a client fix.  Keep that in mind.

All of this had nothing to do with the widget itself as it only allows you to select text in any Notes document, right click and do a custom search!

for this posting



On Monday, November 1st, 2010   by Chris Miller        

IBM Blueprint is launching into the next evolution of the software with Blueworks Live.  A web based solution for collaboration in process improvement.  It includes discovery, mapping, documentation and analysis.

Blueprint's ease-of-use, browser-based delivery and wiki-like structure have changed this and allow stakeholders inside and outside your organization as well as across functions, campuses and even oceans to collaboratively participate in process improvement. Blueprint takes the practice of process from the hands of the few and spreads it throughout your organization. In effect, the Blueprint platform becomes the central communication platform for collecting, sharing and improving how work gets done in your organization.

IBM is launching a free (limited) version as well as a paid professional version.  The paid version adds a bunch more functionality such as:

Collaboration with Multiple Users

• Process Sharing
• Unlimited Maps & Diagrams
• Visio Import
• Templates
• Printing & Exporting
• File Attachments
• Email Notifications
• Integration with WLE

The addition of Visio import is cool if the online software is just as powerful.  I walked through thr account creation process and it was as easy as filling out 5 lines and then I had a full 30 day trial.  After the 30 days I could pay for pro or keep using the free version (I will see how this works in 30 days).

for this posting



On Wednesday, October 27th, 2010   by Chris Miller        

In this September 2010 issue I talk about the Domino 8.5.2 release with you and the following:

IN THIS ISSUE #62
* From the Editor: Chris' 0.79500 HTG
* From the IdoNotes Mailbox: Changing the Inbox Style for Lotus Protector
* Multi-threaded Replication and More in Notes 8.5.2
* Quick Tip: The One Catch We Found in Domino 8.5.2
* From the IdoNotes Mailbox: Finding Notes Jobs


Make sure you:
* head over to Consultant In Your Pocket and catch upcoming FREE webcasts and full replays of previous webcasts
* catch up on the entire Google Apps Migration for Lotus Notes (GAMLN) series here on IdoNotes
* share this with all your geek friends across the social networks

for this posting



On Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010   by Chris Miller        

In order to provide to best results, the custom widget for your Lotus Notes client has been updated with more blogs and removing some that went offline.  You simply grab the widget from the public catalog or download from the below linked posts.   You can also expand this even further by grabbing the plug-in Julian, of SNAPPS, created joining his search bar and the widget together.

If you don't understand what it offers, here is a quick description:

The custom blogger search is based on the Google CSE and now includes over 350 Lotus related blogs, wikis and technical sites. It only searches these sites for speed and web search efficiency.  You can further trim searches down by the categories that are being built such as Sametime and webcasts.  This allows you to find information quickly you know you read on some blog at some point.  PlanetLotus can handle recent lookups, but going further back in the archives is an issue, mainly if they were around before being added.

If you have any questions, please leave a comment.


Related Postings

	Subject
Link	SNAPPS and IdoNotes launch free search plug-in for Lotus Notes
Link	New widget : Search across all Lotus blogs with a right click

If you need help in deploying widgets and plug-ins, watch this webcast on Plug-in and Widget Deployment for Lotus Notes from Consultant In Your Pocket which covers this very topic.

for this posting



On Monday, September 20th, 2010   by Chris Miller        

Simple, here.   http://www.ustream.tv/channel/iamlug

Paul Mooney, Mary Beth Raven, Stuart McIntyre, Suzanne Livingston, me and more..

for this posting



On Friday, September 10th, 2010   by Chris Miller        

If you miss the live webcasts and don't want to sit at the computer watching and listening to the replays for Consultant In Your Pocket, then subscribe via iTunes.  You will get the update as soon as it is posted.   Then watch it on the road, your iPad and more.  There is always the simple RSS feed as well.

Upcoming webcasts include:

• Lotus Protector for Mail Security - Sep 1 2010

Recent replays available include:

• Sametime: A User's Perspective
• Going Beyond Deploy and Pray - Application Release Cycles
• eDiscovery Primer for Domino Administrators
• Deploying Plug-ins & Widgets for Lotus Notes and Sametime

Recent whitepapers released:

• Dynamic Client Configuration (DCC) history and troubleshooting

for this posting



On Friday, August 27th, 2010   by Chris Miller        

It it great pleasure that I can announce the release of the first in a series of whitepapers from Consultant In Your Pocket/Spiked Studio.  The first white paper focuses on Dynamic Client Configuration (DCC) in the Lotus Notes client and interaction with the Domino server.  The paper simplifies the following areas:

• History
• Functionality
• Troubleshooting

So how do you get your hands on this right away?  Simple.  

Subscribe to the IdoNotes newsletter (make sure you select that group as one of your choices) in the upper right corner of this blog. Within 24 hours you get a welcome email with the link to the whitepaper and notices on the upcoming ones as well.

  From then on stay subscribed to keep up to date with the latest commentary only newsletter readers get to see.  Feel free to subscribe to Consultant In Your Pocket, TheSocialNetworker or simply general interest as well.

for this posting



On Wednesday, August 25th, 2010   by Chris Miller        

Only Domino 8.0.1 has listed more fixes listed (2156) than Domino 8.5.2 in a release according the to the Notes/Domino Fix List database on Developerworks.  With an impressive 1448 fixes to date in the database, this proves to be an incredible feature and fix release for the Domino codestream.  You can read all the SPR's listed for each version, by category as well in the Notes/Domino Fix List database.

for this posting



On Thursday, August 19th, 2010   by Chris Miller        

In this August 2010 issue I talk about the cloud over coffee with you and the following:

IN THIS ISSUE #61
* From the Editor: Chris' 1.0000 LUG
* From the IdoNotes Mailbox: Are Agents Executed At Once?
* LotusLive Hosted Notes
* Quick Tip: Spellchecker in 8.5.1 Doesn't Skip All
* From the IdoNotes Mailbox: Sametime 8.5.1 Released, Now What?

Make sure you:
* head over to Consultant In Your Pocket and catch two upcoming FREE webcasts (one being August 18th!! )  or free   full replays of previous webcasts
* catch up on the entire Google Apps Migration for Lotus Notes (GAMLN) series here on IdoNotes

for this posting



On Tuesday, August 17th, 2010   by Chris Miller        

With some awesome upcoming webcasts at Consultant In Your Pocket (for awesome online Lotus related training) and due to the great sponsors, we will be giving away a "Bag of Schwag" to some attendees drawn for each webcast.  Consultant In Your Pocket will begin giving away the "Bag O' Schwag" at the following webcasts** you need to attend:

Join Kathy Brown as she returns to provide you a fun session "Going Beyond Deploy and Pray"  on August 18th 2010, 10am CST,  covering the following:

Thanks to Lotus and Domino’s rapid application development platform, many developers find themselves in a deploy-and-pray application release cycle.  That can be fine for simple applications in uncomplicated environments, but what happens when the feature requests get more and more complex?  Come hear about different techniques for managing Lotus and Domino application deployment and how to get beyond deploy-and-pray!

You can register for Deploy and Pray  immediately right here.

Join Tom Duff and Marie Scott (Tommy and Marie as they are known now) on Sametime: A Users Perspective taking place August 25 2010 at 10am CST .  With the pending launch of their upcoming book on this very topic, follow along as they take you down the path of what a user sees in your environment and how to better think like them when deploying features and functions.

You can register for Sametime: A User Perspective right here

** Yes, we will be using the webcast attendee names of those that actually attend (not just register) to be fair.  You can always watch the replay online after the event, but then you only get to see virtual "Bag O' Schwag".

for this posting



On Monday, August 16th, 2010   by Chris Miller        

In this July 2010 issue I talk about bandwidth for granted and the following:

IN THIS ISSUE #60
* From the Editor: Chris' 0.152847 ZAR
* From the IdoNotes Mailbox: How Do I Remove Recent Contacts
* Recent Contacts - A New Evil?
* Quick Tip: Domino 8.5.1 FP3 Forgot the Router FIx
* From the IdoNotes Mailbox: Lotus Notes 8.5.1 Client Crashes

Make sure you:
* head over to Consultant In Your Pocket and catch one of the upcoming free webcasts or free full replays
* head over to IamLUG and register for the upcoming North American Lotus User Group meeting in August 2010
* catch up on the entire Google Apps Migration for Lotus Notes (GAMLN) series here on IdoNotes

for this posting



On Wednesday, July 21st, 2010   by Chris Miller        

Tom Duff and Marie Scott are doing an awesome developer session on Tivoli Directory Integrator (TDI) for Consultant In Your Pocket.  There are a few slots left to attend (really just a few) for some of the best tips to utilize TDI in your dev planning..

Join Marie Scott and Thomas Duff as they introduce you to the fundamentals of Tivoli Directory Integrator and then show you how you can set up your own TDI jobs to take your data synchronization requirements to the next level.  In this session, the focus will be on non-directory data integration from a development standpoint, with a future session targeted towards the administrative use of TDI to synchronize directories across operating systems and platforms

 They are also planning the TDI for administrator sessions to follow shortly

for this posting



On Tuesday, April 27th, 2010   by Chris Miller        

I had this in the works for some time, but the list was not fully up to date.  It is now updated with all the Lotus blogs I could find.  I built a Google Custom Search Engine to weed out sites that try to use keywords to draw some of the search focus away.  This way we can quickly sort through all of the blogger and technical Lotus content with a narrow focus of a half a thousand sites.

You will always find this engine in the search section on the right side of my IdoNotes blog homepage. I went ahead an embedded it in this posting as well for you to start using and sharing.  If you or any site is missing, the index is building still.  If by Monday you do not show, ping or email me and I can quickly verify with some filtering.

for this posting



On Friday, April 23rd, 2010   by Chris Miller        

April is turning out to be a big month.  Consultant In Your Pocket webinars are going strong the next two weeks with the following:

• Comparing LotusLive, Domino Hosting, Disaster Recovery and More - April 15th.  This is great for admins and managers alike to see how to compare and what the differences are.
• Lotus Developer Tips Every Dev Should Know - April 20th.  This is with Tom Duff and Kathy Brown, sponsored by the good folks at Ytria
• Tivoli Directory Integrator (TDI) the Best Free Tool You have Never Heard Of - for developers on April 28th with Tom Duff and Marie Scott

The site itself underwent an overhaul in look and feel last night.  It also has it's own RSS feed for you to keep up to date with all the new dates.

There is a bunch of upcoming webinars planned covering Lotus Protector, policies, DAOS, ID Vault and more.  Too many to list.  So get over there, register and share the events as well with other administrators, developers and user groups

for this posting



On Tuesday, April 13th, 2010   by Chris Miller        

In this March 2010 issue I talk about filtering yourself (or not) and the following:

IN THIS ISSUE #56
* From the Editor: Chris' 0.0133167 FKP
* From the IdoNotes Mailbox: Move Sametime Server to Existing Domino Server
* Quick Tip: How Does a Consistent ACL Affect Local Replicas?
* From the IdoNotes Mailbox: What is LotusLive iNotes Versus iNotes?

Don't forget to visit CertFX from the banner above and use the coupon code "IdoNotes" to get up to 25% OFF YOUR EXAMS

for this posting



On Tuesday, March 16th, 2010   by Chris Miller        

In this February 2010 issue I talk about the start of Lotusphere 2010 and the following:

IN THIS ISSUE #55
* From the Editor: Chris' 0.0518 XCD
* From the IdoNotes Mailbox: ICM and iNotes Return
* Directory Independence has Been Pulled From Domino Plans
* Quick Tip: Multiple Attachments In iNotes Showing Incorrectly
* From the IdoNotes Mailbox: Which Domino Blog Template Should I Use?

Don't forget to visit CertFX from the banner above and use the coupon code "IdoNotes" to get up to 25% OFF YOUR EXAMS

for this posting



On Thursday, February 25th, 2010   by Chris Miller        

In this January 2010 issue I talk about the start of Lotusphere 2010 and the following:

IN THIS ISSUE
* From the Editor: Chris' 1.2010 MMD
* From the IdoNotes Mailbox: Business Card Photos in the Domino Directory
* Quick Tip: Disabling Remote Images in Lotus Notes Mail For Security
* From the IdoNotes Mailbox: Large File Uploads in Quickr

Don't forget to visit CertFX from the banner above and use the coupon code "IdoNotes" to get up to 25% OFF YOUR EXAMS

for this posting



On Wednesday, January 20th, 2010   by Chris Miller        

Instead of going back into my own posts (there was 155 for those counting in just this blog), I decided to see what the hot topics were for 2009 on PlanetLotus from the listing of top hit blogs total.  I did not see a view for the overall top postings, so I wanted to see the top from each of the below.  Also, it seems it did not go all the way back in 2009 for each blogger based on how much they post, not sure oh what the history retention is.

Blogger	Post
Ed Brill	Notes/Domino 8.5.1 available: So what do you think?
Volker Weber	Collaboration for Dummies
Chris Toohey	Project Abbr - TinyURL-like solution for Lotus Notes Domino!
Peter Presnell	Notes 8.5.1 Helps Break Box Office Record
OpenNTF blog	Four new Widgets available on OpenNTF
Declan Sciolla-Lynch	Learning XPages Part 1 : Application Objectives
Carl Tyler	IBM is slowly phasing out Domino in favor of newer platforms
Gregg Eldred	Memory Leaks in Domino 8.5.x
Bruce Elgort	Our biggest competitor. It's not who you think.
Keith Brooks	"We are going to use Google Apps"
Notes Design Blog	Notes 8.5.1 is generally available today! Here is a presentation that covers most of what is new
Arne Nielsen	Lotus knows where to find a good screensaver for you!
Xpages Blog	What's New For XPages in 8.5.1
Jake Howlett	HTML Emails With LotusScript Just Got a Whole Lot Easier | Blog
Paul Mooney	What mobile device do I choose?
Mikkel Heisterberg	Open Office / Lotus Symphony will be in trouble
Graham Dodge	IBM prefers MS Word ...
Chris Miller	IdoNotes Episode 66 - Quickr on the iPhone launch with project Jonathan
Vaughan Rivett	Is IBM secretly planning “Lotus Notes 8.5.1 – Home Edition”?
John Head	Notes 8.5.1 bring us a true Lotus Symphony API!

*** as a side note I did remove the LinkJam entry since it was a link to another place and not an individual or team blog posting

for this posting



On Monday, January 4th, 2010   by Chris Miller        

In this December 2009 issue I talk about my annual goofy & geek Christmas gifts and the following:

* From the Editor: Chris' 1.0000 XMAS
* From the IdoNotes Mailbox: Mail Disclaimers on NRPC mail
* Configuring Sametime and iNotes (Domino Web Access)
* Quick Tip: Are You Running DAOS on i? There Are Immediate Fixes
* From the IdoNotes Mailbox: BES 4.1.7 and Domino 8.5.1

Don't forget to visit CertFX from the banner above and use the coupon code "IdoNotes" to get up to 25% OFF YOUR EXAMS

for this posting



On Thursday, December 17th, 2009   by Chris Miller        

In this November 2009 issue I talk about the following, and pay special attention to the "Win the Fight to go to Lotusphere" section:

* From the Editor: Chris' 0.159650 MOP
* From the IdoNotes Mailbox: Transaction Logging the Notes Client
* Win the Fight To Go To Lotusphere
* Quick Tip: Google On the Hostname Change Game Again
* From the IdoNotes Mailbox: Deploying Signed Widgets and Plug-ins

Don't forget to visit CertFX from the banner above and use the coupon code "IdoNotes" to get up to 25% OFF YOUR EXAMS

for this posting



On Wednesday, November 18th, 2009   by Chris Miller        

SWAN will be your email answer place for all your software questions, according to this:

Get your software, pre-sales questions answered on SWAN, the IBM Software Answer Network. You can ask sales, strategy and technical questions. When you submit the question, SWAN automatically routes it to one of our 1,200 IBM Software Group experts. Once the question is answered, you are promptly notified by e-mail.

The IBM tool that provides simple search against a wide variety of published technical resources across over 70 data sources is known as Business Partner Q&A (BPQA)

Now, I tried to log in and you do need an IBM id first.  You are directed to the BPQA (Business Partner Q&A) first.  You must search first befire you can submit any question, which actually make sense.  Acronym lookups are available to help in understanding what you are searching for or what they are requiring. Here is a sample screenshot of the Q&A busy busy page.




I hope I didn't forget to mention:

Some eligibility criteria apply.  Entitled Business Partners can ask a new question using Software Answer Network, or SWAN. SWAN is available to Advanced and Premier level Business Partners and Value Added Distributors. Member level Business Partners who have purchased the Value Package can also ask a new question using SWAN.

for this posting



On Monday, November 16th, 2009   by Chris Miller        

In this October 2009 issue I talk about the following, and pay special attention to the editor comments section:

* From the Editor: CHRIS' 8.86624 XOF
* From the IdoNotes Mailbox: The ID Vault and Lotus Notes 7.0.2
* To Package or Not Package My Client Deployments
* Quick Tip: Lotus Notes 8.5.1 Calendar Drag
* From the IdoNotes Mailbox: Sametime Gateway Sizing

Don't forget to visit CertFX from the banner above and use the coupon code "IdoNotes" to get up to 25% OFF YOUR EXAMS

for this posting



On Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009   by Chris Miller        

In this September 2009 issue I talk about the following:

* From the Editor: CHRIS' 0.0542000 SRD
* From the IdoNotes Mailbox: Two Out-Of-Office Agents Per Mailfile
* Potential Security Issue with Microsoft Excel File Viewer in Lotus Notes
* Quick Tip: Display Your Current Timezone in the Business Card Feature
* From the IdoNotes Mailbox: Too Many Mobile Device Types

Use the discount code of "IdoNotes" to get up to 25% off your CertFX practice exams for certification

for this posting



On Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009   by Chris Miller        

We had been doing it in testing mode but went a little larger scale with the new DAOS (Domino Attachment Object Service).  It works, right out of the box folks.

• Set up transaction logging
• make the ODS in 8.5 format (50)
• click a few flags
• start firing off the attachments

The benefits of usage and savings were staggering in the on disk sizes.  Savings were in the 40-50% range right now.  Here is the good news many people are missing.  It is not shared mail in any way.  it uses new NLO (Notes Large Object) file types and the darn thing works across ANY freaking database that shares the attachment and is enabled for DAOS.

DId I say any database?  Yes, discussions, and soon I would think Quickr.

for this posting



On Wednesday, August 20th, 2008   by Chris Miller        

Topics for this month's newsletter include:
IN THIS ISSUE
* From the Editor: Chris' 0.021135 CAD
* From the IdoNotes Mailbox: Sametime Issue for the Blackberry
* Overcoming Issues Using Lotus Sametime with an IP Sprayer
* Quick Tip: Lotus Notes Traveler 8.0.1 Releases HotFixes
* From the IdoNotes Mailbox: Placing a Pilot Domino 8 Server in the Same Domino Domain

Leandro from IBM Brazil also emailed me already and pointed out that the tip for piloting omitted (maybe during editing, who knows) that you should create non replica template copies or set the replication for that server to not include any .ntf files.

for this posting



On Thursday, July 31st, 2008   by Chris Miller        

Carl pinged me over the beloved Sametime Gateway before announcing it to the world so I could beat it up the new Sametime Buddylist Control Tool from Epilio (did I mention free).  While it is strictly a command line interface, it only took them a couple days of downtime to create this.  There are images of it in action on the website.

So the basics are this:

• You could never give users a pre-defined buddylist
• Users had to manually go in and add public groups/private groups and people
• You want someone in particular added to buddylists, like a bot name

You get the general idea there.  Basically manipulate the buddylist how you see fit.  I would like to see this with a pretty UI wrapped around by someone, but I will take this awesome toolset as is for now.

The install was simple.  I chose to place it on my Sametime server directly for testing.  You can install on another machine, but then you need to trust the IP of that machine in stconfig.nsf.  I skipped that for testing.  Large amounts of processing will take time, of course.  But i was quite fast and the results are immediate.  Here is the real kicker to the whole thing.

The tool can run while the server is up and the user is logged in.  No downtime

Carl and his team at Epilio went as far as to create an actual manual with screenshots that can be found right here. in pdf format.  Amazing job and a welcome toolset for my team.

for this posting



On Tuesday, July 29th, 2008   by Chris Miller        

I have seen some excellent sidebar applications for Notes 8 being generated recently, all with the developers starting their own update sites.  Before I list them, here is the issue and warning:

I need you to create these in one of two ways:
1. as a downloadable feature in a zip file
2. or in a siteupdate database I can import.

One of the below sites I visited today gives specific instructions on how to change the client to allow remote site updates.  Unfortunately, policies will revert and disable this for all the users.  By providing me with one of the 2 options above, I can guarantee my users will get the plug-in and I can control distribution, security and resigning.  I also do not allow them to go to outside update sites from those that I specifically list in my configurations.  I really want them to use your apps, but it has to be controlled on this end.  If you need help in building a site, let me know.  I can easily assist.

Some cool ones:

• SideLog by Jeff Gilfelt - awesome tool for working with the Notes log files
• Formul8 also by Jeff  - a developer tool to write formulas
• SecretAgent  again by Jeff - see all the agents in a database
• TwitNotes by Mikkel - unfortunately I think it is broke for 8.5

Update: John Head in the comments mentions the widget.  Unfortunately that is now a requirement for your site to work, Lotus broke plug-in control and I won't allow foreign widgets that pull sites either and no one else should.  Good comment John.

for this posting



On Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008   by Chris Miller        

I have been using TweetScan for some time now to poll Twitter for those that mention Lotus Notes in their tweets.  What you find is amazing sometimes.  Here is some excerpts.  I have my scans set to email me daily..

** qrush : Lotus Notes may very well be the most over-complicated office tool ever devised by mankind. It's a UI disaster
** aaron_miller : Woo upgrading to Lotus Notes 8 tonight
**        careca : lotus notes blows! give me gmail!
** ckwebgrrl : Hating Lotus Notes... I'm starting to sound like a broken record :(
**        aaronmcohen : Lotus Notes works again....Oh Joy.....wait.....now I see all the meetings I need to go to.....damn!
**        seanjackson : oh, lotus notes, how I hate you so....
**        whitneyhess : @mariobourque Ooh you're right. There is something worse than Outlook. Lotus Notes!
**        richrecruiter : Retweeting @kellsworth: Lotus should have been left to karate and plants, and stayed away from Notes and emailing.

So what you find is people that have either bad installs or badly managed environments.  You could go on for days reading these as they come across but I thought others might find it interesting.

You can also expand this and make more scans for your company name, product or even yourself.

for this posting



On Monday, June 9th, 2008   by Chris Miller        

Easy, it doesn't work and is configured in the wrong place (NOTE: the actual template used rocks, hands down.  The process is broken).  I was prompted to write this after the article on DominoBlog.com came out touting the feature.

EDITOR NOTE (May 21 1pm): Everyone understand, the Eclipse Update Site template is one of the better things Lotus has created and shipped that outshines other site update tools.  I love the template and the guy that write it (hey to TG on amazing work as usual).  I am only talking about the process by which the client uses this template.

Instead of using policies in Notes 8 to force clients to see an update site, they chose server configuration documents.  Let me break down what is bad about that in a moment.  Currently, most every admin will want to make sure the ability for clients to install their own stuff is turned off.  Ok, that works.  However, you must then place an update site link in the server configuration doc that the user never seems to see.  Why the heck didn't you use policies?  The server configuration document has the global setting for both Smart Upgrade and then Provisioning, but the Desktop settings policy only has Smart Upgrade as shown here:



So what is expected is that each user will hit the server and see the server configuration document.  This in turn will somehow get them the provisioning database or site.xml from there.  Well this opens another can of worms.  We teach and implement multiple places to reduce the extreme number of server configuration documents and to simplify.  But if I want users on different home servers to hit alternate update sites only, then I have to go back and create multiple server configuration documents.  Conflicts terribly.  The site update database was built with replication in mind.  I can create it once, push it out all over and have users hit sites local to their area for performance.  With a policy I would be all set.

The real kicker here is that the client never seems to see this new setting and never gets the provision on a consistent basis.  I have had one or two magically work, and others never work.  All at the same server with the same version of client.  Riddle me that Batman, both why it sometimes works and why it isn't in any policy setting to do controlled/distributed provisioning.

for this posting



On Wednesday, May 21st, 2008   by Chris Miller        

So the internal NOC team here uses Neoware thin clients to connect to the Citrix 4.5 server.  Today the Windows guys decide to upgrade to 8.0.1 Standard and find that each user was, as expected, using lots of memory around 400MB each.  With the machine it runs on being a dual processor with 3.5 GB of RAM, they had higher expectations.  So after everyone came on day shift and logged in as usual, the machine started grinding.

Unfortunately, they want all the bells and whistles, but back to basic mode they have to do.

for this posting



On Thursday, May 8th, 2008   by Chris Miller        

I ran across a tool called Twist which gives a graph of how many times words or phrases are used in Twitter.  For fun, I did Lotus Notes versus Microsoft Exchange (using just Exchange gave every instance and was to much).



The downside was that many of the Lotus Notes postings were negative.  How about some more positive tweets?

for this posting



On Thursday, April 24th, 2008   by Chris Miller        

If they happen to be able to know what to do when they see green, yellow and red, then this should be simple.  From the words of one of our customers

Lotus could not have made seeing quota limits any easier and for training users on new features in 8.0.1 as we deploy

for this posting



On Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008   by Chris Miller        

I sent a Twitter yesterday on how I was overlooking the obvious in setting up some secure mail between two sites.  They wanted to use S/MIME.  Did both run Notes? No.  That would have been easy with sharing of public keys and letting them encrypt until they couldn't breathe.  This was a Notes to another email package.  So the theory was creating X.509 certificates, passing them out like Halloween candy treats and hoping everyone nibbled.

Then it hit me.  Why are we going through so much work here?  So we got a common and known Internet certificate for both servers, made sure that the other side could understand it and forced all communication via TLS from SMTP to SMTP.  Their whole point was encrypting data between the Internet flow, not necessarily once it was received since multiple people may need access to the data.

We set Domino 8 to force the TLS conversation and stop if it could not make one.  We made sure the other server understood to start a TLS conversation when asked and off we went.  Secure Internet mail flow between disparate sites at will.

for this posting



On Friday, April 18th, 2008   by Chris Miller        

If you attempt to run the ApplianceWare installer on Linux for Sametime Advanced, you will notice that the plugins for Websphere fail, which in turn breaks the entire install of course.  Some examination shows that line 167 in the installer file refers to a directory with an Uppercase while the actual install file creates it with a lowercase.  So I edited the installer for the ApplianceWare version and the install went off just fine.

Chalk one more up on the wall.

for this posting



On Thursday, April 3rd, 2008   by Chris Miller        

Surprise, disappointment, amazement, laughter.  We got every reaction possible.  Andy and myself fended off countless questions from a fully packed house.  The extra seats we planned open were taken by some last minute drop-ins that registered.  So what did we learn this city?

• 95% of the attendees use Sametime
• 100% were at 6.5.x or higher and wanting to go to Domino 8.0.1
• Not having Citrix support already for the Standard client made more than one of them very disappointed
• Widget policies were a selling point
• Lotus Connections, Lotus Protector and mainly Productivity Tools were not anything they cared about.  Did I mention Productivity Tools?
• Companies in size from 250 users to 40,000 all really use Domino
• Some admins are lucky when they get to go to Brazil for 9 days to install one Domino server
• Lotus Foundations is a cool product if you don't already have a Domino domain, which they all did of course
• Integration of Sametime is awesome
• Integration of Activities is confusing
• The Sametime Gateway is of interest to them
• Coffee breaks are not often enough, mainly after huge lunches
• Attendees love free tools that we give away
• Expanded policy control for desktops and security will be implemented right away
• People are tired of Smart Upgrade and want full provisioning

I am sure there is a few other I will add in.  To summarize, the love Domino 8 and wish there was few more things that had made it into the product at the same time.  Social networking over here is not popular, while internal chat is.   They always have very specific and unique questions that we love getting answers to for them.  So excuse me while I collapse, eat a final dinner here and then head home tomorrow .  Check my "Where am I headed" tab to see the cities I have booked up.

for this posting



On Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008   by Chris Miller        

Every time the client goes into a standby (not hibernation but definitely where Windows closes the screen down and stops spinning the disk, the error shows.  I let  a machine sit and then logging in gave this

for this posting



On Friday, March 28th, 2008   by Chris Miller        

Our customers have forwarded a blog posting from Mayflower Software that suggests you remove DNS blacklists and then let their software handle everything for spam.  While there is one valid point, adding an immeasurable load to your Domino server is not something I suggest.  many of the comments on the blog post reflect that fact as well.

I hate to discourage the use of any technique that can stop spam, but I think DNS blacklists should no longer be used by Lotus Domino (IBM Domino) email administrators.

So then jump down to the comments and see what others have to say:

Blacklist can produce false positives but really have positive impact on load. Especially when our SMTP server have limited bandwidth and ratio rejected/accepted messages is high as on our server (we have over 90% rejected connections). Then disabling DNS blacklist does mean that our load on line will be 10 times bigger which is of course unacceptable.

So to our customers that saw this, I write my opinion here.  While someone may be blocked accidentally for whatever reason, there is the phone.  The load that could come from this on your server is not worth letting a Domino based spam solution solve.

for this posting



On Friday, March 28th, 2008   by Chris Miller        

Another interesting bout with unknown causes of server setup failures on an additional Domino server.  We were setting up a hosted server, that was to get the necessary data through a private connection with an address supplied by the IT team at said company.  We could hit that IP address over port 1352 successfully, so all was good there.  However, the server setup would always stop at 20%, which normally means that it cannot connect.  Yet even a simple telnet showed that it connected fine.  So as we were about to cheat and have them zip and send names.nsf and some other stuff to set the server up locally and then let replication take over, NotesPing was quickly tossed on the server to some interesting results.:

Determining path to server XXX.XX.XX.94
Available Ports:  TCPIP
Checking normal priority connection documents only...
Allowing wild card connection documents...
Enabling name service requests and probes...
Checking for XXX.XX.XX..94 on TCPIP using address 'XXX.XX>XX.94'
  Connected to the wrong server SaidServer2/SaidDomain using address XXX.XX.XX.94
  Connected to the wrong server SaidServer2/SaidDomain using address XXX.XX.XX.94
  Unable to connect to XXX.XX.XX.94 on TCPIP (Connection denied. The server you connected to has a different name from the one requested.)
Checking low and normal priority connection documents...
No default passthru server defined

So NotesPing showed us that the server they gave us as an IP address and name, was not the right one for one of the two variables for the setup.  Correcting either the IP address for the SaidServer or the server name for the IP address solved the issue.

for this posting



On Monday, March 24th, 2008   by Chris Miller        

Some of you hopefully read the posts and technotes regarding the new filtering rates that AOL has deployed against chats coming through the Clearinghouse.  Well I started getting emails and pings asking what it all meant.  So to honor everyone's requests, I did some digging around with AOL people to get some answers:

• The rate limit numbers are not linear
• The rate limit numbers are built dynamically with an algorithm, meaning each company will be different
• If you run a bot that does heavy traffic, like an automated helpdesk or query bot, through your Sametime Gateway into the Clearinghouse, you may contact AOL to have it provisioned

So as you see there is no hard numbers per customer, per connected Sametime Gateway.  It is a dynamically changing rate based upon your normal usage.  Now I know they do not have 40 guys that are there doing simple math charts.  Which means that if you suddenly spike the amount of traffic you are sending through the gateway into the AOL Clearinghouse, you might get limited down until they figure out what is going on.  Meaning you might end up calling them.  So if you are implementing a new bot, I would get in touch with them and get it provisioned first

Make sense?  If not let me know.

for this posting



On Friday, March 21st, 2008   by Chris Miller        

Get yours today hot off the presses!

IN THIS ISSUE
* From the Editor: Chris' .4630821 VGS
* From the IDoNotes Mailbox: Bringing Together Multiple Sametime Services
* Part 2 of 3: Domino Monitoring and Reporting
* Quick Tip: Can Both Lotus Sametime and QuickPlace/Quickr Be Installed on the Same Server?
* From the IDoNotes Mailbox: Websphere Books For the Sametime Gateway and Sametime Advanced

for this posting



On Thursday, March 20th, 2008   by Chris Miller        

They are not federating the two services, rather Google grabbed onto Open AIM and said why not log in from our interface into both.  So Google Talk becomes a consolidated IM client.

for this posting



On Monday, March 17th, 2008   by Chris Miller        

Due to a very bad UPS device, thrown circuits for protection and gremlins, we had a hard crash on some servers this morning.  So here is what we found out.

All the Domino servers restarted successfully as a core, but any server that had HTTP in the servertasks= line would not fire up the task after the hard shutdown.  We had to manually go in and start it to clear the alert.  This was on all the servers 7.x and higher (sorry no older ones to test on)

hmmmmm

for this posting



On Wednesday, March 12th, 2008   by Chris Miller        

I just presume most of you see, read or subscribe to the LotusUserGroup.org Sys Admin newsletter.  But as I sat here writing the March edition, I realized you may not.  So get over and catch up darnit.   There was a Blackberry series last year and right now is the middle of a monitoring series.

What are you waiting for?

for this posting



On Friday, March 7th, 2008   by Chris Miller        

I posted this at my alter blog but it sure consolidates a lot of my efforts quite nicely.  It is lighter than Trillian Astra, at this point, which is a nice touch also.  Take a peek and grab the beta.

for this posting



On Wednesday, February 27th, 2008   by Chris Miller        

You can catch the posting from their own site here, but the following image shows what they offer

for this posting



On Monday, February 25th, 2008   by Chris Miller        

Interesting since it was a workstation...  with an upgrade happening  ..from Notes 8.0

for this posting



On Monday, February 25th, 2008   by Chris Miller        

If you follow my Lotus Support Mega RSS Feed that I created for all of you (including widgets) then you would have caught this.  If not...  here

IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8.0.1 (including Lotus Domino Web Access and Lotus Notes Traveler) are now available to address issues and provide new features. The following document contains important resources to assist you with your upgrade to Lotus Notes and Domino 8.0.1.

for this posting



On Tuesday, February 19th, 2008   by Chris Miller        

I created a Google gadget of this also but I am piping my LotusChannels Jaiku feed into Dapper to make some widgets and gadgets. Then we can toss this into the Notes 8.0.1 widget sidebar and viola!
Note that you select which technote you want and click the twisty to have it slide open to see more of the entry

Add to your site   powered by Dapper

for this posting



On Tuesday, February 5th, 2008   by Chris Miller        

One part of me really doesn't want to know this much all the time.  The new age parent says this is a great ideas.  See the image..



Seems to me the old idea of be home by dark is gone.

for this posting



On Monday, January 7th, 2008   by Chris Miller        

Issues have come about with the deployment of the Sametime 8 client.  There is some missing pieces to the provisioning mainfest that will prevent the ability to properly upgrade/update the client in the future.  If you already have 8, you have to get the patch out there.  If you are just staring to deploy Sametime 8 clients, then get this in place first.  This technote goes into full detail on the fix and what is being changed.

Without implementing this fix, administrators will not be able to successfully maintain Sametime Connect clients and keep them up-to-date with the latest maintenance releases.

If the Sametime 8.0 Connect client has not yet been deployed, administrators can simply replace the provisioning manifest (also known as the install manifest) with the updated one included in the download package referred to above. This issue impacts both the stand-alone client installation package as well as the Network Client Install (NCI) package.

for this posting



On Saturday, December 29th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

Alan and Carl had both posted on Symbaloo.  While I was doing a site review for the other blog, I figured it might well fit into this one as well.  This site actually has a hidden social networking hook, allowing you to create custom pages and send them to others to use as their desktop.  Much like Pageflakes does in theirs where I already created pages for Notes bloggers and the Lotus Support RSS feeds.  (listen to my podcast interview of the Pageflakes founder, a former Notes guy)

Since there are screenshots on the other pages (including webware) I will leave those out but tell you what I think.  The iconic type desktop works well overall.  While some of the icons actually utilize the main center window to show the results of what you click, others open new tabs or browser windows (found in settings).  You actually get the most function by making your own pages and adding content that you want.  There is more than a handful of built in widgets and feeds, from there you can also add your own site or feed. There was 2 Gmail links.  One took you to the actual Gmail login page in a new tab, the other was a functioning widget.  I would suggest they blow the new tab one away and stick with the widget to keep you in their page.  I also found I could not drag the icons between pages, which is something we are used to in Notes for sure.

What I didn't like is how most of their icons they provide of them simply took you to the site.  You cannot enter your credentials and have it log in and bring you some form of miniapp window.  Symbaloo is a visualization of your bookmarks.  But there is no way to take my existing bookmarks and make them a visual page!!  That bites.  I also could not find a way to import an OPML stream to have it populate pages with existing feeds I watch.  RSS streams in the blocks would make this site somewhat useful, but I still prefer Particls, Spokeo and now Streamy.  I found places to manually enter single bookmarks and manually enter a single RSS feed, both labeled beta at this time.

You can create links for audio streams and use widgets for Last.FM.   But the widget area has a lot of room to grow before it is very useful.

for this posting



On Friday, December 28th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

I will say this first, I do have my issues with Lotus Connections.  So this is not a Microsoft or Lotus bashing post.  It is a posting directed towards social networking in the enterprise.  Many of you know I run an alter-ego blog at TheSocialNetworker.  I am starting to get more site review requests that I can run through in a timely manner, so I take the ones that look the most interesting and go from there.  So I ran across a slide set found here that was co-presented by Peter de Haas at the end of November 2007.  I see he and Stuart had some comments back and forth when I went looking in his archives.  In the set there was the following slide towards the end:



If you take the second line that says Microsoft 2007 Office System, you could go with either Lotus or Microsoft on this one.  So without reading what Stuart had to say on the topic, I have my own thoughts.  Both of the companies are fighting for what the consumer (public) space already has in abundance.  The question are:

• how to relate it to business usage
• secure the data
• get people to utilize it
• allow outside data to be referenced and pulled in
• give the users the Ohh's and Ahh's they find on the consumer side
• provide presence both for internal and external awareness
• open the system to pull in external feeds in a structured and loose manner (ie: Attensa and user defined feeds)

The approach on the underlying purple, blue and green colored areas above fit into both vendors.  The question is who can make their product grow up the quickest and maybe pay attention to suggestions (cough cough)

for this posting



On Wednesday, December 26th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

I just came across an article on Publish.com discussing IBM Metaverse project.

IBM's Metaverse virtual reality software ... Though still a bit rough around the edges-it won't be mistaken for Second Life-some 2,200 IBM staffers are testing ways to collaborate with colleagues in the Metaverse, according to Mike Ackerbauer, innovation manager for collaboration development at IBM.

Ackerbauer said IBM staffers leverage IBM's internal virtual conferencing application through Web services to have online meetings in 3D.  This approach is a boon for IBM employes, who are spread out all over the world.

The meeting room Ackerbauer showed eWeek was sparsely furnished, but serviceable, with a screen on the wall to simulate the typical conference room.

What interested me was the statement in the article that they are looking for VOIP solutions inside of it, including hooking it to Lotus Sametime.  Forget making profiles in Lotus Connections, get ready to make avatars.

for this posting



On Friday, December 21st, 2007   by Chris Miller        

I posted a couple days ago on the missing feature that we saw at Lotusphere2007, but didn't seem to surface in the Sametime or Blackberry messaging client.  Well I finally got some updates from same avid readers to the blog across timezones (I love the Internet) :

The demo that was shown at Lotusphere used the Ascendant to bridge all the Sametime users into a conference call.

Then another update showed from someone else putting it all together

Today, you are "linking" a Sametime user to an entry in your address book so that you get the added menu items of "Email, Call, SMS, MMS."  RIM will add the Click to Map feature

Looks like a winner when it arrives!

for this posting



On Wednesday, December 19th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

I happened to be poking around Lotus Greenhouse and saw a bookmark from January 2007 (Lotusphere2007) for a press release between Lotus and RIM.  It highlighted the new "Convert to Call" and "Click to Map" that would be possible.

RIM Showcases Unified Communications Breakthrough for Blackberry Users At Lotusphere
RIM is showcasing a new feature called "Click to Map" that will allow users to generate maps on a Blackberry handset within the context of a Lotus Sametime session.  The "Click to Map" feature will launch Blackberry Maps from within the Sametime client software and generate a map that illustrates a colleague's location based on presence information retrieved from Lotus Sametime.

This is a cool feature I would love to see in place.  I know the "Convert to Call" is kind of there, but that seems to not be in place either.  Maybe I missed something in implementation or does this need the Sametime 8 Advanced Server that is not due out till next year some time?  Also, does the map render from the location they type into the client?  I am not sure how that would work either looking at the preferences in the Sametime Connect client for the Blackberry as shown in this screen capture:


I can't seem to find a menu item for mapping the user in the Business Card or main screen.  Anyone?

for this posting



On Tuesday, December 18th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

Sametime normally would create the required Directory Assistance on the fly and keep right on rolling.  A fresh Domino 8 server and Sametime 8 install gave the following today:

error returned from CreateSTDatabases
Error encountered in the local server while setting up LDAP directory support da.nsf

File does not exist
DDNALocalDominoSetup returning with error code = 0103
SetupLocalSvr returning with error code = 3701
SetupSvrMergeWithDomino returning with error code = 3701

function: TermNotesRT

I quickly started the Domino server, created the Directory Assistance and then restart the Sametime setup.  Weirdly it now saw the install as the ability to:

• Install a new instance of Sametime ?!?!?
• Upgrade an instance of Sametime ?!?!?

I took upgrade as fix the install that is there please.  And away it went.  Now let's see how it did.

for this posting



On Friday, December 14th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

I made this posting yesterday to an interesting number of comments and this one might go a bit further.  Sametime 8 gets closer to an actual provisioned installation.  Much better indeed.  I praise Lotus for listening to my rants on provisioning and deployment management.  However, this became a noticeable problem here and after consideration and some talks with those deep in the bowels of Lotus Sametime development we (as in they and I) confirmed my fears upon first testing.

Here is what happens.  Sametime 8 does not see the previous install path (as shown yesterday) since it is not upgrading your Sametime 7.5.x client.  It is installing Sametime 8 and then uninstalling 7.5.x from your system.  It reads your settings and places them into a lookaside database to move them across during provisioning of the new 8.0 client.  What this means to you is that you then cannot install into the same directory you had 7.5.x at first.  If you install 8.0 into that folder and then it goes to uninstall 7.5.x it really removes all the new files also.  Quite the conundrum isn't it?  I know I want mine in the same path all the time.  With this scenario, I cannot hit the site and have it upgrade what I have in place.  So if you have company standards on how the client is installed, you may be looking at uninstalling the old version from everywhere, then running the install for 8 afterwards into that same directory.

Lotus also changed the folder structure and naming of the Sametime Connect files.  This adds a new level of change for the plug-ins.   We will cover more on plug-ins on the next posting.

for this posting



On Wednesday, December 12th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

This image shows on a fresh laptop that only had Sametime 7.5.1 installed a couple weeks ago.  This was the network install attempt and then the locally saved attempt at a Sametime 8 client install on the same laptop.  The first thing to arise was that it did not see my previous installation path.

for this posting



On Tuesday, December 11th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

Here is what I found.  I installed the Sametime 8 server and also placed the network-install package on the server.  For those of you not familiar with it, I suggest you go read how this is done over here.  I then started the download.  I forgot to specify the base URL inside the download properties though and when the install attempted to complete, it came up with errors.  Lots of errors.

I then went back and placed the correct URL in the download properties file and tried again.  I noticed that the install seemed to download incredibly quick.  Halfway through, it then stopped and just sat there for a long time.  I killed the install and tried again.  Same thing.  It then hit me.  The original download was still in my cache for the browser so it was still reading the bad data.  Here is a screenshot:



So I went in and removed that bottom file from the cache to see what the result would be.  As expected a much longer download started again.  You need to know the original part is 29MB and then more is pulled from the server.  The client code itself is still 135MB when it is on the machine.  So I am off to delete the file and redo the install.

for this posting



On Sunday, December 2nd, 2007   by Chris Miller        

You can find the technote right here

Content Hardware requirements
The following hardware is required for the systems that host IBM^® Lotus^® Connections services.
At least two Intel^® 64 or IA-32 based server machines
Two CPUs per server, 2.6 GHz CPU speed or higher
Minimum 4 GB of memory per machine

Plus a special note for using Lotus Domino as the directory source:

Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) server
IBM Lotus Domino 7.0.2 and later.
Note: Before you can use this LDAP server, you must apply fix PK52839 to WebSphere Application Server.

for this posting



On Thursday, November 15th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

I picked this up from the following blogger John Resig..

Gmail has a hidden feature: Atom feeds for Labels! The technique is simple:
1.        Setup a filter to catch all email from a specific mailing list.
2.        Apply a label to all of that mail (e.g. 'list').
3.        Access the Atom feed via this URL: https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom/list/ (changing 'list' to be the name of the label.

So if you take this and then flip it to Domino, you could create a rule to tag or sort your mail-in databases and then push this out to the feed readers with the RSS capabilities of Domino.  This would solve an alert issue for numerous people that share part in a mail-in database.  Everyone could read the stream based on what category they handle from a single course that is tagged/foldered/categorized properly like you can do already with my blog.  Go to the archives tab above and look at the different pre-categorized feeds you can get form one single database.

Same idea, just move it to other data stores in your Domino architecture.

for this posting



On Monday, November 12th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

I get asked this question often and there are factors around total usage, number of chats and the rest of the usual suspects.  But I wanted to show you a simple screenshot of memory from the gateway being up somewhere around forever in terms of the Sametime Gateway



There you go, just over 600MB of RAM dedicated to the gateway including some DB2 processes

for this posting



On Tuesday, November 6th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

So last week I had a blog posting about the issue surrounding the Premier Audio Adapter for Sametime.  One question came in that needed a definite answer.  Some of you were trying to update the certificate and could not find the location.  Well from Chris O himself who did the majority of making Premier talk through submission holds, here you go:

Location of keystore for Premier - Tell him to look in the notes.ini for the location of the java SSL keystore.  That is the location of the file it is using.  We actually had to remove the file and then create a new one with ikeyman and import the Equifax cert since it is not a default certificate

for this posting



On Monday, November 5th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

We ran into this issue the past week and I wanted to share this.  We have a Sametime server that runs the 7.x code stream with the 7.x Sametime code on top.  It also has the Premier Audio Adapter for holding the audio bridge conference portion.  Well it suddenly stopped working and communicating with Premier to begin the bridge.  IBM seemed to be stumped and pushed us to Premier.  Premier says they don't totally "really" support it either since it was developed by IBM and handed to them.  So we get stuck in the middle.

Alas, never mind that portion we found the culprit of why it stopped working.  Premier updated their SSL certificate on October 4th of this year.  The local keyfile had the expired previous certificate.  So it just never connected.  No warning, no alert, no log.  No connection.

We could get no debug variables to place in for the adapter so after a clean install and replace some files I copy in below, all was well once again after a week of running in circles.  Good job to Chris O at my office for sticking this through and beating out of them that they changed their SSL after we told them that was an issue a ton of times before we got confirmation.

The AA install program installs a stkeys.jks file that I cant 'open' using Ikeyman, (haven't tried certsrv). So after a re-install i delete the stkeys.jks file that the audio adaptor creates, and then create a new one using Ikeyman. But the Equifax cert ( the SSL cert premiere uses )  isn't included by default so I had to download it and add it to the stkeys.jks.

for this posting



On Tuesday, October 30th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

You can read the article from yesterday right here, but the main quote:

Comcast officials say the Lotus Notes problems were caused by a software glitch, adding that the company does not block customers from using file-sharing applications. It does, however, manage its network so that a few subscribers using bandwidth-hogging programs don't slow everyone else's Web surfing.

for this posting



On Wednesday, October 24th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

I previously did posts and podcasts on this topic (I even took a humorous slant after upgrading countless servers).

• Listen to Episode 28 with Scott of Lotus that not only got downloaded an amazing number of times, but had tons of info.
• Listen to Episode 27 with Andy and Rob of Technotics as we talk all about DST impact

But I noticed one thing from listening to the callers this morning.  A lot of people have been doing upgrades, changes and deploying applications since the last DST time change.  Yet everyone has the same question.  What version has what fix and if I upgrade is it done?

So Lotus, we need a simple scenario listing in a whitepaper or technote that shows the outcome of where they are now and what steps are needed.  Such as:

•  you already patched for spring and have not changed the server code
• you patched for spring and have now upgraded to X.xx version
• you just installed version 7.0.2, is there any patches I need or is it included?
• you were in a version 6.5.x and patched in spring, we then upgraded to 6.5.6.  Do I have to repatch?
• Other countries are now going into time changes, so if I have international servers/users I now need to patch those? (like Australia and Brazil)

for this posting



On Thursday, October 18th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

So while I wait on hold for it to begin, I will take a few guesses at questions that might get asked.  This session is being recorded by IBM

• Provisioning
• Performance
• Policies
• Stlinks
• Telephony integration
• Peer to peer audio and video

Ok, here we go...  Bill McAnn was the call moderator. hey took some questions from the forum first to prime the call

• Lock a client to connect to a specific Sametime server geographically? Yes, point to a home Sametime server.
• I have installed Sametime 7.5.1 client and did the Outlok disablement hook after following the workaround.  But when upgrading to FP1 it came back.  This will possibly be fixed in a later version, but not 7.5.1  Technote #1259391 addresses the issue

off to the live calls

• I know the voice and name of this caller!  But I wont call him out.  He wants to build a silent install package to dump out with SMS.  There is some issues with this.  There is a new client with the proper fixes, including CF1.  It comes with the installer and since it is a full client you have to open a PMR to get the updated installer package.
• Provisioning the preferences in the Sametime client. One is the site update.  One is the plug-in customization.ini, but that only gets read once.  Does the site update have to be a feature jar file?  The feature jar file approach is delivering a new or updated piece to the plugin_customization.ini filer.  This file is read each time the client is started.  The ini provides the default settings preferences.  End user overrides in the client preferences will still overtake what is set in the ini file.  You cannot swap it out at install time.  An update site must be a jar file
• Policies regarding chat recording, with the value set to save or not save.  If you uncheck this does it force down to users not saving chats.  Lotus says unchecking this does not set auto-save in the client.  Checking this forces the user to save chats.  There is actually two policies.  One allows them to save at all and the other allows auto-saving.
• When was the silent install that includes the msi, when was it released?  Sep 21st or so was the release date.  Also, they want to fill in the community name and pre-configure TLS?  Craig jumped in to say he belive it is possible now.
• They have multiple servers, a web portal with stlinks, web conference server and chat servers.  People get logged off when the move around servers, why?  Jennifer at Lotus says Portal was giving a new IP address coming in so it was being seen as another user.  She gave the example to ignore when you come in twice that goes in the config section.  The user must also be homed to a Sametime server or cluster.
• The CF1 version of 7.5.1 takes care of a lot of issues but one they had.  When you install and launch the client the Terminal Services application continues to run?  Harry, dev manager at IBM, asked to clarify operating system and client.  It was OSX 10.4.10 with Sametime 7.5.1 CF1.  When you launch the Sametime client it also launches Terminal Services.  They do not quit and continue to stay launched.  The client works fine, but you must manually quit the Terminal Services.  The Sametime 8.0 beta weas brought up to try it there.
• The next caller wishes to turn off the resert button in the client.  Craig said there is no policy or previous request to turn this feature off.  The caller saysd for compliance reasons they muyst lock the user from being able to change communities.  Craig says 7.5.1 said you can change the host without resetting the user, which could be an issue.  He referred to the policy to force the default community.  Unless you have multiple communities, then this policy would apply.  The caller has Facetime in the middle to capture for compliancy.  Lotus suggests hiding the Sametime MUX so no user can directly connect to it.
• The user policy, user preference, and then plugin_customization.ini is the order of load for the Sametime Connect client.
• I missed one call for a person coming in, sorry
• The next caller asked about the StReflector being set up.  If you are doing many audio or video chats then moving it to another box will assist in performance.  Voice chats work fine internally but not over VPN nor outside, including NAT.  The reflector will let each clients see the others IP address.  Point to point will always be first, then the reflector.  With exxternal users with symmetric NAT you put the reflector outside the organiuzation.  A normal or non-NAT firewall, the clients will still try to do point to point.  The reflector must be able to go through the firewall.
• Prudential wants to deploy a basic client and send out the features, yet they cant lock them down.  They want a list of what cnd cannot be locked down.  The only settings available for lockdown are those in the policies on the server
• Can you secure audio and video to a particular group?  Yes, use policies

for this posting



On Tuesday, October 16th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

While we were here at the Notes and Domino 8 Upgrade Seminar, I needed a place to send the users to get as much information on deploying composite applications (aka shelf-apps, plugins, whatever) into the Notes 8 client.  Well low and behold a decent one existed..

Here is the page...

This web log is a joint effort by the key technical architects and user experience professionals to open a direct line of communication with developers about the capabilities of user facing composite applications.

I also had the link up on how to move a Sametime plug-in to Notes 8 client.  Here was that link.

for this posting



On Friday, October 12th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

While Andy blogs the pictures and what happens while he is not onstage presenting, we had a good conversation yesterday on message recall features in Domino 8 I wanted to recap from when I was presenting.  We learned some time ago that message recall would be on by default when you either install or upgrade the server to Domino 8.  Here came the comments.

The issue is that if you wish to have it on in the server configuration document, policies must then be used to turn it off.  Instead of enabling it further for certain users, which one would expect.  When I relayed info from the podcast that Susan and I did weeks ago about how the Domino 7 server will send the recall requests to the Internet by default and you can even recall mail sent in the past before the upgrade, eyes went wide.  The final straw was that no indication is left in the recipient mailfile that a message was even there.

This discussion and slide review covered about 30-40 minutes of the session itself.  Without giving away all the parts, just because it is a new feature doesn't mean it should be on was the general consensus.  Some said they would have it enabled after some time, but having it on when you install/upgrade was the wrong choice.

for this posting



On Thursday, October 11th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

This is something I did not know and never would have encountered due to the way I implement this solution at customer sites.  In the Gateway configuration you specify a local Sametime Community.  Which of course is where your users reside.  Well you only specify one server in this listing (or I should say one DNS name) for connectivity.  The Gateway then goes about it's business and starts serving presence awareness and chat services for the public providers.

Well unknown to me, if you do not run in a central clustered environment and have users spread across servers that may be geographical or just in the same place , but not clustered, the gateway needs and wants a port 1516 connection to each and every server, which it then holds in a local file.  This does not worry me as much as it appears some company security groups.

The Gateway is just what the name applies, a gateway.  Just how you deploy external SMTP servers and then only allow them in through the firewall, via trusted IP's usually, this acts the same.  So have no fear, the Gateway is doing it's job by not storing data and only offering a direct connection to the public providers and then 'proxying' the traffic to Sametime.  Your user directory is not affected as well as you can control which providers come into the Gateway and then how just the Gateway communicates to Sametime.

So do not freak out, it is all in how you present it to the team in most places.  Those that still don't get it, probably never will.

for this posting



On Monday, October 8th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

So it all started on Sunday when I went to the airport to head over to Finland via New York.  Of course I check my flight status, get last minute emails and other weird things people do to waste time on the Blackberry.  I land in New York and check the next flight as I walk across the terminal, looking with half an eye so I do not run into anyone.  Or anyone else checking their Blackberry or smartphone that happens to be walking towards me.  

We don't look anyone in the eye anymore, we stare at tiny few inch screens.  Or we walk with the Borg attachments in our ears in circles in the airline lounge talking to seemingly no one.  Quite loudly.  In circles.  Loudly.  Talking to no one.  We have cords strung from our ears to our waists and can type 40 words per minute without looking and with one hand.  We can re-book a flight while everyone else stands in line, but we can't remember how to communicate with people verbally.  Heck, half the people try to mimic smiley faces with gestures now just to act like they are sending chats

I shut down all electronic devices as required and prepare to get some rest on the flight.  Which does not go as planned, but not as bad as getting no sleep at all.  Once off the plane it is time to turn the Blackberry back on to check if the car service is there and if any other plans had changed.  All is well and on schedule.  I arrive at the customer site and get straight to work.  They don't have an extra network line ready for me in the conference room and I accept that I cannot get on the wireless.  No problem, the corporate housing awaits that evening (or 8am my normal home time)  So I would not have missed much of anything and I got email all day.  well the housing has one TV in a common area and one PC line in there also.  No lines in the rooms, no wireless.  I can live with that.  Until I discover that the PC line there only accesses their Intranet and you need a username and password for the proxy.  I send a quick email with the Blackberry to the team I worked with.  Some answers from their Nokia phones.  We can check tomorrow.  I say hey, I have email and a bunch of DVD's  haven't watched anyway!  Time to relax for a night.

The next day I load JiveTalk to consolidate all my IM services onto my Blackberry instead of individual clients.  More on that later.  I like it though.  I also have the office set me on tether modem on the Blackberry but overseas it gives me some weird error.  Maybe because you dial that weird #777, who knows.  I work on that later.  Word comes from the security team that they are very unfriendly and do not have or will issue a temporary proxy account so I can use the network there or at the housing.  So I am full fledged Blackberry and accept my fate.

• Lotus Notes email access - well duh, BES server
• Sametime - Yes, Sametime Mobile 8
• Chat - JiveTalk for AOL, Yahoo, ICQ, Google and MSN
• Google email - yes I have the downloaded Blackberry mail app from them
• Other emails already configured to go to the Blackberry device through BIS
• News and such - many choices.  Bloglines for Blackberry and Pocket Express
• Facebook - Blackberry access in browser at http://m.facebook.com
• Jaiku - Blackberry access via JaikuBerry
• Blackberry Messenger - for all the time chat to the wife on her 8830 and also friends with Blackberry that have connected
• Tethered Modem - heck no, Verizon Access manager needed which takes a PC to get.  Their website is not Blackberry friendly at all and really needs a WAP interface.  All the darn scripts drove me nuts using the Blackberry browser

So where do I sit now?  Thumbs really do hurt some, the battery goes faster when you constantly use it, I expect no less.  Could I make it my lifeline, sure.  Do I need some of the Domino apps, sure.  That is how we do business.  having them offline is great, but not being able to sync does no one any good.  The Blackberry stepped up when it needed to and covered all the basics.  It does have me on the hunt for even more and better applications for it too.

for this posting



On Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007   by Chris Miller        

The guest speakers didn't make much sense at all to me for Social Software for the enterprise outside of 1

• Janine Popick, CEO of Vertical Response
• John Landau, CEO of Customer Experience at Huddle.net (UK company)
• Mike Walsh, CEO of Leverage Software

Matt Anderson of Radicati was the speaker.  After 5 slides it went to Q&A with the panelists.

• Vendors that they listed included Lotus and a slew of others I did not know offered such solutions.
• The suites are what Lotus Connections offers with some added parts like Business Intelligence
• They then have specialists that work on each part of the software itself
• The market drivers were just what you know now.  Make some teams and share some info then find people around them
• The market barriers are what you expect but easily overcome.  Compliance (US issues), deploying new technologies

Q&A section

1. What does your offering provide to set it apart from other offerings

John Landau - Current enterprise software is inside the firewall focused and Huddle is trying to get externally focused as well.  Pushing for the MySpace generation and use of social networking is growing and businesses are banning such site access to MySpace.  The Huddle tools are aimed at business users.  The low cost of Huddle was their other point of their offering
Mike Walsh - They are trying to making it easier for the business person to make and find relationships.  Taking some of the Web 2.0 items , with security and making it easier for the business worker to share information in a collaborative environment within and outside the company.

2.   What was the initial pain point that caused them to look for a social networking solution for their enterprise?
Janine Popick - They have 30K small business customers with only a small number (50) of employees.  So they are the customer experience side.  They let the customer

3. How has business social software changed how employees share information between themselves and with customers?
Janine Popick - They have an award winning blog.  Employees post more content to give them exposure.  They use Leverage as their social software choice it was said.  They also started a Facebook group with about 200 members giving product feedback.  There is a wiki in place to post documents and share information.

4.  What are some of the key factors when vendors go up against Microsoft Sharepoint in this space?
Mike Walsh - Everything is based on the needs of the users.  It varies across prospects.  He said Sharepoint, which is a great product, and Lotus Connections, which he was not familiar with, helps them find the right people for a specific person to assist with a project or prospect.  he said Sharepoint seems to be for internal collaboration behind the firewall.  he does not look as them as a competitor, but as augmentation.
Jon Landau - They are often compared to Sharepoint.  The perception he finds is that is a free tool but the TCO is incredibly high for a business.  It does well for internal collaboration.  But the idea is to bring external clients together with the inside groups and becomes costly with Sharepoint.  Kingfield is a customer of theirs, and they were looking at Sharepoint until he brought Huddle to them.

5.  What were some of the critical features that your business looked for in a social software package?
Janine Popick - They found that their customers that used their service needed different feedback.  So small groups of customer types are forming.  They are also able to push focused product release information.  Finding users "like me" on a people map and then reaching out is helping the company since they already compile a large amount of data from each customer.  Live chats are helping get feedback on what features of their product are most important.

Questions from the audience....
1.  What are the real benefits, like ROI.  These seem like a solution looking for a problem.
Janine Popick - One of the things they did when deploying was hire someone to manage the deployment.  Without someone to drive and manage this can fail.  This person also participates in the social network by watching and even generating conversations.  On a hard ROI front they know they are saving time on email and feedback processing.  Vocal people in the communities help promote what is needed without them sending out constant user surveys.
John Landau - Huddle offers the ability to share documents and work together internally and with external partners gives a tangible ROI.  If that was done by email instead, You end with multiple people looking at different versions and chasing information.  Huddle has the centralized upload, sharing and work area to set approvals and tasks, etc.
Mike Walsh - They were out as a social network platform before Facebook caught on and now everyone is clamoring for this type of application.  They work with 300 companies with different goals and needs.  ROI might be decreasing support, increasing upsell, increasing customer loyalty, getting products to market faster by getting feedback.  Microsoft, HP, Oracle, Salesforce, Time Warner, NY Times are all sample customers.  Some need projects done faster and others are using it to find hidden talent in the company.

2. Were are a small software startup with 400 partners/resellers, can you describe the benefits of utilizing the software?
Mike Walsh - They do work with smaller companies to share best practices.  Relationship building through the social network is a huge benefit.
John Landau - You are able to bring all these partners and resellers into one social network so you can all chat, talk working group and share information with branding and customization.

3. How does voice and real-time collaboration overlap with services such as the social networking vendors?  Will you follow?
John Landau - Huddle is in a position in the next few weeks to offer integrate single sign-on ability.  Web conferencing tools are also being built into the product offering.
Mike Walsh - Open architecture through widgets allows you to add features and functions even without their help.  They are partnering with companies like Webex and SalesForce, or even pulling in a Skype or Webex widget.  Also a GoToMeeting widget as they used in this conference.

4. Is there a listing comparing what these vendors offer in their social network offerings? (my question)
They will have a listing in the Radicati report

5. How do you deal with issues around compliance. (yada yada yada) ?
Janine Popick - She does have compliance issue it seems.  They use a wiki for a lot of collaboration but will be tightening up how the information is controlled.
John Walsh - needed the question repeated.  The data can be exported so it depends on the requirements of the organization.  One feature they do not have is document check-in and checkout.  Their solution has revisioning and tagging.  How it is completed and found is up to the client, such as Wells Fargo.
John Landau - The document management system saves every version of the document as it is worked on.  Their solution is geared towards compliance.  You can see date and time stamps for all edits, updates, changes and new items.

6. What is the cost for trials of these softwares?
They will send that out later or go to the websites and get some free trials.  Huddle and Leverage offer free trials.

Sara Radicati wrapped it up with not much fanfare but look for their report, of course

for this posting



On Thursday, September 27th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

A short article playing on the fact of Lotus entering the office software space full force.  One part of a paragraph stood out to me

He then equates Google to the latter-day Lotus, painting a scenario where Google smugly laughs off a bloated but feature-rich (imaginary) NewSDK from a bratty startup, only to then get disrupted by this SDK when browser capabilities improve. Of course, part of the analogy breaks down because Microsoft was hardly a bratty startup when it succeeded where Lotus failed.

This article goes after the older Lotus office entry with SmartSuite I believe and not the current Symphony part Deux.  I have not said much about Symphony, there is plenty out there.  I used the Productivity Tools during Collaboration University as well as OpenOffice.  I found issues in both.  I use Microsoft Office most of the time because that is where the masses were right?  But will Symphony part Deux take over a huge slice of the MS Office world?  Not in a large percentage.  Can it assist in the SMB space that uses Lotus already?  Maybe not if they move to 8 and use the built in Productivity Tools.  So the press is behind the announcements, IBM is pushing the newswires with the announcements, people are downloading to check it out.  So how fast will Lotus update the software to match and exceed what is out there now is what remains to be seen.

for this posting



On Wednesday, September 26th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

I ran across this site and pinged Carl to jump in and see what we could make of it.  There is the good and the bad.  No the bad is not this following screenshot.


So we were being silly to play around with the features.  Headsets on backwards and others.  When you use the chat room it takes a snapshot of just how you are when you click send.  So the pictures are resized too small for you to see, but Carl and missing pants is bad all around.

Good
Free video conferencing is good no matter how you slice it if it works well.  This one seemed to do just fine.  Now, we didn't get 8 people in the room, but that is next on the list.  You had the choice between hands free audio and push-to-talk type.  Both seemed to function fine.

Creating a room for the conference did not even require registration at this time.  Simply name a room and click invite and it copied the link to the clipboard.  It then uses the Flash connection for your video and audio.  No problem, worked right away for both of us.  No fuss, no mess, no firewall issues, no downloads.  The chat was, well chat.

Bad
It seemed there was a way to record but I couldn't find the button.  Chat worked fine, but needs a bit more ability.  Attaching or sending a file would be nice so everyone could talk.  It still is not a 1.0 release so I imagine more is coming.  I am curious about the bandwidth as this grows, but let's see how it plays out.

So overall, did I say it was free with no firewall issue in the tests?  No tunneling and numerous ports for AV like I got asked yesterday for Sametime

for this posting



On Friday, September 21st, 2007   by Chris Miller        

I received a ping from a Sametime admin/company/user with a question regarding the limit in the number of slides per set you can upload to 7.5.1.  Apparently after 100 it would not allow the slides to be uploaded.  So some hunting around came up with this little bit of info for all of you to try out in case you are having 7 hour meetings with hundreds of slides.  Oh the pain of that type of meeting...

You can work around this issue by either creating a presentation of fewer than 100 slides or by not selecting the Master Slide option in PowerPoint.

for this posting



On Thursday, September 20th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

Sean Burgess and I are working on a top secret project together, ok that is strong but it will be fun, and we created a new Domino blank database.  I created it with a Notes 8 Standard client on a Domino 8 server.  He accessed the server with a Notes 8 Designer client.  Now the weird part.

I couldn't remember, and didn't bother checking, what hierarchical name he used in his id so I simply entered Sean Burgess as unspecified into the ACL.  He could not get in the database.  I changed it to type person and added his O certifier and he got in fine.  Wondering what gives here as this might have other implications for us in multi-tenant cross-certified environments.

for this posting



On Friday, September 14th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

Hello all-
Iread with much interest all comments about DDM, in response to my (previously published) article.  I can only say that I fully agree with all these comments and I hope that this post will make things even clearer.

DDM is for sure an improvement and IBM kept improving the monitoring of Domino since version 4.  Some DDM features are very useful and a few of them cannot be provided by any other product, including ours.

My article is actually not only regarding the benefits of DDM, Admins can judge by themselves about its value.  What I can hardly understand is the marketing made by IBM around DDM.  Was there so little to say about new features in Notes 7 that IBM chose to present DDM as a revolutionery product ?  I do not question the value of DDM but all Admins having worked with Notes since R4 know that DDM is mainly a revamp of existing features.
I'm also surprised by IBM's plans of releasing a major release yearly.  In my opinion, a major release must provide significant enhancements and new features.  Fixing such deadlines leads to a very strange situation where 4 different versions of  Notes are maintained, including the version 6.5 which nobody knows whether it can be considered as a major version or not.

The ones having discussed with me know that I'm a strong advocate of Notes for many years. However, I agree with Philip's comment about IBM competing with it's partners and I'll add that I'm puzzled by the lack of long term strategy in this company.   I'd prefer that IBM spends its energy fighting with its competitors, not its partners.  OK, I'll stop now before IBM people get mad at me once again.

Back to DDM, I don't like the design of this product:
1)  It bypasses some standard Notes concepts, which is unacceptable to me:
- automated replication
- relies on Notes when it's supposed to monitor it
2) almost all information is not real time (unacceptable for a monitoring product)
3) it's mainly server based with all related drawbacks:
- resources taken from servers and possible crashes
- problems with heterogeneous environments (versions of monitoring code and servers)
4) real useful features are in my opinion reserved to skilled users

Comparing to Monitor:
1) Monitor doesn't have any of the drawbacks listed above
2) Monitor provides major additional features and supports other platforms (clusters, Sametime, BlackBerry, etc ... and soon Exchange)

In conclusion, I agree with someone's comment that DDM can be useful as a entry level monitoring tool but falls short for monitoring large (or critical) environments.  As far as being a revolution in the Notes world ... let's be serious a minute, it's not.  The real revolution happened about 20 years ago when the concepts of replication, UNID, certificates and views were put together to create Notes.

BTW - nice to see that quite a few people also use our products :-)

Kind regards
Philippe

Philippe Schlier
CITS - EMEAI
E-mail : pschlier@gsx.net
__________________________
GSX Groupware Solutions
Web site : http://www.gsx.net

for this posting



On Tuesday, September 4th, 2007   by Philippe Schlier        

I went ahead and posted my notes on this since I had answers (posted in each one with italics) to some of the questions they were asking.  Maybe some of the callers will find this posting.  These were quick notes to myself, and I only slightly cleaned them up.  So bear with me.  (I am headed to vacation)

• Asia Pacific area looking for a proof of concept install for their business and need NAT and public CA documentation.  Caller said they got the wrong certificate purchased, that it didn't support TLS.  Lotus is working hard in 8 to simplify install and config.  As for NAT, they list the restrictions for NAT due to SIP.  Certain NAT providers are becoming SIP aware due to VOIP and other real-time collaboration.  As I posted about the morning call, I will shoot out some diagrams for everyone since this seems to be a main focus.
• Caller is implementing Sametime 7.5.1 and having client issues, even with CF1, of getting layout and pre-population to clients.  Preference controls like auto-status changes, for example.  Lotus suggested utilizing the   plugin_customization.ini file to change and set some of the settings.  They have no policy control with the 6.5.1 server and Sametime Connect 7.5.1 CF1.  The issue is that they must then match the new policies when going live with the server on 7.5.1 or 8 to make sure they do not change everything back.  This is a big part of rolling out the advanced client and wanting particular features enabled or set a certain way before the server policies are deployed.
• Another caller emphasizes the issues with SSL config from Premium Server as first caller.  Thawte server worked fine.  Yes, I am seeing in installs that you need to import root certificates in many instances to get it to work.
• Australia - IBMUS and Australia connectivity problems.  Customer is using dual network cards trying to route public and private address.  asking if the OS will do the routing.  Part 2 - Wants to talk his SIP to their SIP.  Asked about port 443, which is not right.  He needs port 5061 for encrypted, not 5060 which is unencrypted.  No 443 need.  1516 and 1533 open for internal connectivity on 7.5.1.  Then 1516 for 7.5.1 CF1.   Also asked about LDAP server connectivity over 636.  DB2 server, is it encrypted by default and does Express C handle it?  Not by default, and maybe not in Express version, have to verify that.  IBM SIP gateway connectivity actually needs port 5060 for the first connection then 5061 to finish.  LDAP SSL relies only on the LDAP server having a public certificate.  What data is stored in the DB2 database, a security concern question.  Lotus answers that in the DB2 database you can find the gateway configuration data, user id and group id in UNID form.  Last question, checkpoint firewall in front to cover NAT issue?  Lotus has customers with it.  Multiple NIC cards not an issue as long as its config'd correctly.  I say why not use NAT and routing with a single NAT instead of trying the dual-NIC approach.
• What kind of arrangement does IBM have with the chat vendors in terms of IP address changes?  same question as this am, same answer.  Then MSN connectivity question.  no official statement yet from Lotus.  I see the IP address changes a hard part for firewall teams that are trying to set the port to only allow certain addresses to talk to the gateway.  That is a tough move when you are relying on a 3rd party (IBM) to tell you when they are changing their IP addresses.  How about just moving to a DNS range for the provider and then everyone is happy.
• SIP phone as PBX install.  Asking for connectivity options as general PBX integration.  Good question but no comment was provided to direct them to the vendors writing plug-ins and softphones.
• Customer wants an  easy way to find out what other corps are using the gateway?  Lotus does not keep or publish that.  Creating a Sametime Gateway group in Facebook or a posting in the Sametime forum was a recommendation.  There is a Facebook group for the Sametime Gateway already with a good couple handfuls of members

for this posting



On Friday, August 31st, 2007   by Chris Miller        

I attended the Open Mic call on the Sametime Gateway this morning to see what everyone had concerns about. (Do not worry, this call goes live again one more time tomorrow I think, see the website or Partner Forum for details).  Well I came away with concerns myself as I see how this is getting implemented at the larger enterprises.

There were at least 15 calls taken, and I managed to capture and write down the main point of each one.  The majority revolved around a couple key areas, and that is where the concern is.  Participants were asking for network diagrams, port settings and allowable IP addresses and better clustering support.  While some of the questions did receive direct answers, in my opinion some did not.  Now someone there will say it was not official support inquiries, no official statements, yada, yada.  But when you have large enterprises trying to deploy a clustered solution in large deployments with too many network security teams in the mix, well you get confusion.

First thing to the companies.  Too many companies are trying to reverse proxy, put servers in front of server even in the DMZ, build SIP clusters with load balancers/IP sprayers.  I agree with one thing for sure, everyone needs the cluster support to deploy this is an enterprise solution.  As for all this worry over this server in the DMZ, why the stress?  No data sits on the gateway server, it connects over SSL to your internal LDAP (further restricted by port and hosts is needed), it uses the encrypted VP protocol to the Sametime clusters in the back.  DB/2 can sit behind the firewall restricted by host/port access also.  So you basically have a shell running a program that acts as the gatekeeper.  Or gateway as it is named.  Get the security team to understand this.  There is no data to be protected, if the gateway gets bombed or hijacked, then they get an empty shell that you cut off.

Second thing is to Lotus.  Come prepared.  Half answering chat logging questions, diagram requests, proxy support and numerous clustering questions won't fly for long if this is truly an enterprise solution.  Yes you did answer some areas of what is coming, things that are verified in support and even how to map multiple O's through LDAP queries to Domino.  But the lack of testing of clustering and the network outline support is frustrating to most of the callers if my current pings I am getting are right.

for this posting



On Thursday, August 30th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

This was after doing the suggested Ctrl-Shift-L to see shortcuts



All was better after a restart however and it now works fine

for this posting



On Monday, August 20th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

So here is the big issue.  The documentation indicated you can set a policy for multiple groups of users and then update the users with different settings, plug-ins and pushed updates.  Some of this is quite true.  UNtil we get to site update parts.

I would have sent you here on Notes Net, but apparently the published info for CF1 is not complete.  See line 21 for some humor.

So what happens is that you can set an update site in the default policy, but it then overrides all the new group or explicit policies.  You can not set alternate update sites for different users.  They are grayed out with the provided default site.

Move on to leaving the update site blank and then the sub ones are forced to be blank.  Same scenario as above in reverse.  So in essence you have to provide only 1 update site at this time for your user population.  That doesn't help if you want users to get alternate updates or plug-ins at this time.

I bet it is on the list for the future though..

for this posting



On Wednesday, August 8th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

Well here we sit at the next step.  First of all, the update itself requires 2 restarts of the Sametime client.  While a full installation would only require 1.  Yes, they are updating components that need other updated first.  Just a warning for users.



So the updates do fire down the changes, and they do leave the other files locally, just one of those things to deal with.

for this posting



On Monday, August 6th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

After some gracious time on the phone with Lotus following Friday's posting, we found a few things to make this next screenshot work.  I had the site update listed in stconfig.nsf as the

URL for UIM provisioning:

This never seemed to work.  Updates were not coming down as I talked about on Friday.  We then placed the site update in the default policy.  Unfortunately we also had to do a reboot.  So I am not sure if the reboot or using the policy instead of stconfig did the trick.  We are testing that again one step at a time to let you know.

for this posting



On Monday, August 6th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

I already had the site specified for all the users in stconfig.nsf.  It was the same one I used before for the patches for the Sametime Gateway in 7.5 CF1 world.  Unfortunately it is not updating the clients now with the changes.  I am doing this in stages, meaning I have not rebooted the Sametime server since changing the site.xml file.  It shouldn't need to be done, so I didn't.  I simply updated the xml and waited for today.  Nada, nothing.

So looking at the local files in the plug-in directory you already have for Sametime Connect 7.5.1 compared to the new site update, none of them seem to match from the first 10 iI checked.  Either they had

com.ibm.collaboration.realtime.feature.version

listed instead of the new ones that did

com.ibm.collaboration.realtime.751.CF1.feature

or they were entire new features that did not exit before.  So the new ones should come right down.  But how about the ones that do the same thing but compete?  Shouldn't they simple update the date at the end of the feature line.  Instead of

com.ibm.collaboration.realtime.sprite_7.5.1.20070416

They go and toss some oddity name of

com.ibm.collaboration.realtime.sprite.feature._7.5.1.20070723-1402

How does that update the existing one or how does it know which to use unless called from somewhere else?  How can we clean up these older ones with the updates?

for this posting



On Friday, August 3rd, 2007   by Chris Miller        

First let's cover the files.  There is a CF1 for the Sametime Gateway out there, just not Windows yet.  Amazingly the Sametime 7.5.1 server only gets a mere 69MB of update download while the Sametime Connect client gets a whopping 204MB file download

The Readme for the CF1 update can be found right here.

Server
So I compressed the installer and let it fire off for the server.  It says the total update size is 79.9MB and goes on quite willingly.

Client
So you have choices to either run the installer in it's entirety on the local machine or push out updates via the update site.

CAUTION(S): Not all updates are applied when using the update site method.  Read the release notes carefully to know if your issue is covered band by which method.  Also, you may not want the automatic update if you have not aplied at least CF1 to 7.5.  There is an admin update that must be done as shown below in the image.

There is quite a few packages as shown in this image:


Also, the Single Sign-on with the operating system is now available, as well as additional dictionaries.  Those are added plug-ins that need to be deployed. Each comes with it's own site.xml that you can merge centrally or push into siteupdate.nsf from a Domino 8 server.  Then you get the user policies in place.

Let me run the update and full installer and let you know those results next

for this posting



On Thursday, August 2nd, 2007   by Chris Miller        

From reading the web advisory and then the IBM technote, it seems to be all versions of Sametime, including 7.5.1 with an availble hotfix for all versions.  Future updates and fixes will contain the fix also.

Problem In very specific scenarios, there is a possibility that a Sametime® server could be exploited by a Cross Site Scripting vulnerability.   Solution In a specific instance, it was found that a precisely crafted Sametime meeting could potentially contain text that would expose a Cross Site Script vulnerability.

This can be addressed in Sametime 7.5.1 by applying an available hotfix. All future releases will contain this fix within the shipping version. Additionally, the same issue was not seen using the EMS server.

for this posting



On Wednesday, August 1st, 2007   by Chris Miller        

People have been asking about how it works without installing it. Well the team updated the package with a ton of new features. They also put out a quick video that gives you a chance to see the new features and the actual reader in action.

for this posting



On Thursday, July 26th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

Thanks to Lars for pointing this out, but there is a typo in the July Sys Admin Tips Newsletter that went out this morning.  I am glad so many of you read it.

So that will force the Eclipse part to start and then the 'basic' client inside the wrapper. Simply make yourself another shortcut that points back to the nlnotes.ini in the same root install directory

That should read to point to the nlnotes.exe and not the ini

for this posting



On Wednesday, July 25th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

Well interestingly enough there is more fixes in the CF1 for Sametime 7.5.1 (there is 84) than there was in CF1 for 7.5 (there was 69).  What you need to look out for is that if your fix happens to be in this maintenance release, some of the SPR's require a full installation instead of the site update version.

Keep that in mind when deploying the update.  Some of the features will not be updated properly without downloading and installing the full package just as you would for a fresh install.

for this posting



On Thursday, July 19th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

Chris,

This is in regards to the entry in the May issue of the Sys Admin Tips
newsletter from someone who wanted a tool/agent to report on user mailfile
sizes and quotas. I had previously written an agent to generate just such a
report. It sends a simple text email with the report details. I've attached
an export of the agent as an .lss file which can be imported into any
database. The only other setup that needs to be done is to set a few
variables in the Initialize event (name of the server to run against, name
of the person(s) to send the email to).

Hopefully you can pass this along to the person who posted the entry.

-Ernie

Here is the download -->

for this posting



On Monday, July 16th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

CA key rollover not recommended in large organizations In Domino 8, administrators can assign a new set of public and private keys to a Domino certificate authority (CA), which are used to certify the keys of OUs, users and servers in that organization. The process of assigning new keys is known as key roll over, and is documented in the Domino Administration Help topic "Certificate authority key rollover."
The CA key rollover feature has not been tested in Domino customer deployments, so its use is currently not recommended in these environments. Organizations that want to become familiar with the feature are encouraged to use the feature to roll over the keys of a test CA, and then test users in their environment.

We are testing this on a test domain and found some oddities in who got updates and who did not, plus the variance in Lotus Notes client versions plays into it.

for this posting



On Friday, July 6th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

The error uncovered by myself and John Roling (Greyhawk68) is that upon a fresh, new, virgin Quickr 8 installation, you could not log in ad the admin account specified during setup.  It was guaranteed that the name was not in the directory, but it would not let me log in.  SSO worked fine as I was even able to log in as my name.

After some friendly cajoling to Rob Novak, I dug deep and found that the notes.ini variable for the Quickr admin name did not match the name in the LotusQuickr\LotuysQuickr\Admin.nsf database.  The very place you had to authenticate.  I even ran the qptool to change the admin password incase I mistyped it originally, no go.  Modifying the notes.ini variable to match the database ACL, creating a group to match the database ACL for the QuickPlaceSuperUser group and then adding the administrator group to that as a subgroup worked great.  I was able to log in as myself, change the directory, security and Sametime settings and it seems Quickr is flying high on our internal server.

Oh yes, do not forget to also do the technote changes for fixes for Quickr already.

for this posting



On Thursday, July 5th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

I am on the new beta for Trillian and will talk plenty about it shortly.  But this one preference was more than interesting.  I talked to Adam G about it briefly and he named it TiVo for Trillian.  They call it Time Travel as shown in the image:



Notice you get to replay quick bursts of audio and video chat.  Quite the cool tool when you miss something.

for this posting



On Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007   by Chris Miller        

File - Make Available Offline  is the menu item that tells the user they can take the data with them (local replica).  Then they get a simplified UI with defaults already set that looks like this:



The best part is that if the database already has a local replica then the menu option is grayed out.  Cool!   Seems to be a very simple way for users to create local replicas of databases.. errrr..  applications

for this posting



On Monday, June 18th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

I am calling this an issue whether it gets counted as such or not.   While working with a new Sametime 7.5.1  cluster (version doesn't really matter here) against a Domino LDAP cluster (version 7), we set a limit of 100 for the maximum number of entries returned against LDAP browsing and searching.

This broke the ability to add names to policies or browse from the 7.5.1 Connect client.  If I allow the maximum returned entries to unlimited, it allows you to add names to policies and browse from the Connect client.

In my humble opinion, I should be able to set a limit, still add names to policies and only have a certain amount returned when someone tries to browse the entire LDAP directory.  This would force the user to use a finer search string and release load on the LDAP server when there are over 20,000 users involved.

Make sense?  Bug or no bug?

for this posting



On Sunday, June 17th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

While we were building a Quickr cluster for testing here in Sweden we came across an interesting scenario.  They had set the hostname field in the server document to the DNS name of the cluster.  Then, when setting qpconfig.xml to utilize a cluster hostname we also set it to the cluster DNS name.  However, it started placing the DNS cluster name twice in a URL when creating places.  For example:

http://quickrcluster.company.com/quickrcluster.company.com/placename

Now if we removed the qpconfig reference to the DNS cluster hostname and set it to a totally different host such as quickr.ibm.com it worked perfectly.

The solution?  Remove the DNS cluster name from the server document hostname entry back to the actual DNS entry for the server and then reference the DNS cluster name in qpconfig.xml and it all worked great.  Apparently placing the same name in both causes a duplication but having alternate names get replaced.

for this posting



On Friday, June 15th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

One of you out there had a quirky RSS feed which was affecting the install.  If anyone has any issues grabbing and completing the new install please let me know so we can get it fixed right away.

So grab it right here or go back and read the previous blog posting.  I will post more tech tips around tweaking it shortly.

for this posting



On Thursday, June 14th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

for this posting



On Wednesday, June 13th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

Sorry for the delay, I was traveling out of the country right after Admin2007

Warning: I would zoom in many times.  The image is large in width and height to see all the font and information clearly.

for this posting



On Wednesday, June 6th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

Sorry for the delay, I was traveling out of the country right after Admin2007

for this posting



On Wednesday, June 6th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

I know I had issues on one machine and got an IM from another person looking for the installer for Plazes 2.  So here you go!

[Plazer]Version=2.1.2706
http://www.plazes.com/files/Plazer2Setup.exe

for this posting



On Friday, June 1st, 2007   by Chris Miller        

It is nice to get feedback with either corrections or just plain happiness for a posting.  Attensa sent the Director of Marketing to show me that you can install the new beta of their RSS reader into your Sametime Connect client.  This beta has a few options in the install.  It will hook into Outlook, IE, Firefox and Sametime.  Nice touch, don't think you need it everywhere at once however.

It does prompt you to become your default RSS reader, so beware on those screens.  It also puts a desktop alerts icon in the system tray, I am waiting to see what that part does with a follow-up posting.  Here is the screenshot from the first part of the install after selecting ONLY Sametime components.  It did drop a nice amount of files into other areas however, not just a plug-in as one would normally expect.

for this posting



On Friday, June 1st, 2007   by Chris Miller        

So I loaded up the new beta 3 code and was happy to see everything it offered so far.  First weird thing (outside of the mail template that I am paying with and making sure I am updated right first) is that Sametime 7.5.1 can get installed and even places an icon in the system tray.

However, there is no click or double-click on this icon.  Only right-click that has status changes and the ability to log off.  If this will not offer the normal client functionality, then I say remove it.  More confusing that I cannot double-click and have it open my contact window or pop it open in the client.

for this posting



On Friday, May 25th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

Here in lay the issues:

• I send a video chat request to another user, they get an audio prompt
• I find out the local laptop firewall might be interfering and disable it temporarily
• I get video to work (which runs across the UDP ports)
• Recipient drops randomly and can't see text chat windows
• I end video chat and text chat I was typing appears

Later, I check the memory utilization.  If I do not start a video or audio meeting, I can get the memory down to 5MB or so after the initial launch through the old bug they still have in how you minimize the client.

However, if I run a video chat, no matter how I minimize the client I still eat over 40MB of RAM.  I will grab some screenshots shortly.  This is amazingly high compared to any other chat program I run, even Flock

for this posting



On Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007   by Chris Miller        

I went ahead and started the process of adding memory and shortly some new processors and diskspace to the blogger server.  We are growing at a nice clip, not too much at once.

• Stuart McIntyre will be moving over the QuickrBlog, LotusConnectionsBlog and CollaborationMatters
• Richard Thomsen started up the midwestik.com blog (I need to get him not to forward and to point it to the server I see). He talks about kayaks and Domino.  Interesting combo.
• BucktheBug.net is also live from Michael.  While I can't read a thing in it, Babelfish might be a good idea here
• Carl TYler moved over iminstant.com a while ago

for this posting



On Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007   by Chris Miller        

I frustratingly gave up on the upgrade path after getting a couple more emails of the same issue happening to them.  So last week I stopped  trying to run the scripts IBM sent and wiped the machine of all components of the gateway.  That meant Websphere, DB2 and the gateway code itself.

I totally reinstalled 7.5 FP1, then patched Websphere to 6.1.0.7 and the gateway to 7.5.1.  All seems to be well at this point.  But note, when I say removed and reinstalled, I did not create any community connections until the code was upgraded.  Apparently if there is any community defined, the error commences.  Without them, or a new install, you are good to go.

So I am back on AOL, Google Talk and Yahoo through the gateway.

for this posting



On Monday, May 14th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

While performing a fresh install of the new code, Sametime Gateway 7.5.1, I found that the path for the Gateway code itself now defaults from the previous RTCGateway to STGateway.

DB2 also takes a new table name as STGW.  While the upgrades will work just fine, it is interesting to see such changes as this.  I imagine this has much to do with the renaming of the product from the original Real-time Collaboration Gateway to Sametime Gateway last year.

However, the profile name does remain the same at RTCGW_Profile and the server as RTCGWServer.  Weird some areas made the shift but not others..

for this posting



On Wednesday, May 9th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

We went through this before with the FP1 patch for the Sametime Gateway.  If you refer back to my previous posting, once the patch was applied it destroyed the portlets for management of the Gateway portion in the Integrated Solutions Console.  It was easy to fix by uninstalling the patch.

I then mentioned that I went through the 7.5.1 upgrade and it did the exact same thing.  Now I have been getting some help from Lotus, but I don't get how having communities defined would break the install.  I also thought it might just be me until I finished a customer call this morning who had a pilot of the gateway running.  They attempted to upgrade and got the same exact same portlet destruction.

Pardon my frustration..

for this posting



On Tuesday, May 8th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

****Just to clarify, this is a separate instance and install of Lotus Connections from paxos that got announced for BP's yesterday.


This site allowed self nomination some time ago and apparently has had people in it for a while.  Growing slowly, just like a greenhouse would grow plants.

First impressions are that this could be a very cool way for partners customers to start communicating from all over the globe.  The site is a bit bogged down, I imagine over the demand of everyone logging in.

Do not panic if you cannot edit or update your profile yet.  Read the fine print.  It can take up to 24 hours to get your profile built into the system.  While you can log in, you just can't update it yet.

The intro screen is cool with hints of Quickr to come.  I would love to see Sametime tossed in there for presence.  This does add a minor change to my Activities plug-in in the Notes client.  I had it pointed to the wrong  IBM server it seems.  Not Greenhouse.

As I just around Greenhouse some, you will see there is a heavy European presence that has been in there for weeks creating communities, Activities and profiles.  So don't be surprised to see almost 900 bookmarks already in play.

for this posting



On Tuesday, May 1st, 2007   by Chris Miller        

I had the chance to take some other business partners to dinner last night while they are here for Partnerworld in St Louis.  We had the mixed conversations around business and fun.  One thing that came up was this very Lotus Connections site.  A lot of interest is being generated about the site and some of the wonderment of where it will take us.

Will it be the start of a BP "MySpace" or "FaceBook" with no long term inherent value?  Or will it grow into a full networking, people locator, community of interest, project (activity) sharing and link sharing that you would dream.  Can it handle the influx of visitors it will generate soon?  Where the heck is the integrated Sametime? 

Sit back with me and watch. Martha Mealy posted about the attempt to find relevant statistics for collection.  I strongly agree with that question she put out to everyone.  What are valuable stats?  Number of hits? no.  Number of communities? no.  Usage patterns of features? yes.  Blog entries? no.  Profiles? no.  Searches against profiles? yes.

the list grows....

for this posting



On Monday, April 30th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

I have not tested this yet as I was uninstalling the beta code or upgrading beta code.  So if you have older versions, confirm this since I do not have a moment to do so right now:

On the 7.5.1 Connect client installation, it asks if you want to remove any existing Sametime 3.x or 7.0x.  Generally you would say yes as I did.  It then identified that I had Sametime 7.0x and asked if I really wanted to remove it.  That was OK because I knew what was going on.  But the problem is that I didn't have Sametime 7.0x, I had 7.5

P.S. after I installed, I launched it and the About splash screen didn't go away.  But that was fixed once I rebooted. :-)  

for this posting



On Friday, April 27th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

I had seen this before and heard it from another person but could not get it to reproduce on any consistent level.  However, it has now hit the Sametime forum on Notes.net as a thread.

It seems that under certain circumstances the Sametime Connect 7.5.1 client keeps looking for the Microsoft Outlook profile.  Even with Lotus Notes clients on the desktop and Outlook not configured.  A check of IE shows that the mail program preferences is also set to Lotus Notes, so no conflict there.

There is the new Office integration component that is offered, however the client still prompts for Outlook profile upon launch after configuring it to use Notes.

for this posting



On Thursday, April 26th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

I imagined someone would ask eventually or at least figure it out.

Hey Chris, saw all your postings today on 7.5.1.  I downloaded the new client but don't see anything but the full exe file.  Do I need to expand that to get the Eclipse update or will that be coming soon?  Great postings, thanks!

Well that is a great question.  One I have asked.  You would expect with all the hype around Eclipse and provisioning clients you could simply toss some code for a site update.  While this would be many files and larger than a normal small push, it would all be done in the background and then they get restarted and viola.  However, Lotus said they were not ready for it at this release, or something in those words.  You get the drift.

So what that means is you must have each client download and install the full new code, just like a fresh install would be.  It will upgrade seamlessly, it is just a packaging step you need to do.

for this posting



On Thursday, April 26th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

I first reported this issue back in January, as seen here Link    It seems that if you have existing communities in the Sametime Gateway and attempt to upgrade it breaks it all.  Now how do I get back is what I am figuring out right now.  This was immediately after the 7.5.1 upgrade, WAS .7 patch and launching.  Then a restart and launch did the exact same thing.

for this posting



On Wednesday, April 25th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

You receive the choice to restart the Sametime Connect 7.5.1 client after installing a new plug-in.  You can also apply and continue working and restart later to activate the plug-in.  I chose to apply and keep working.  I got the following:

Either that is a cool white plug-in or something is amiss

for this posting



On Wednesday, April 25th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

I loaded the new gold client on a couple fresh machines to see what results we got.  While the new UI is shiny and nice like I promised, here is what I saw on the "hope it was fixed" list:

• The memory utilization is crazy.  Upon launch with no plug-ins loaded yet, it was 67MB of RAM.  Compared to other chat programs, that is an easy 3-4 times larger for some of the exact same functionality (like Yahoo messenger 8.x)
• If you happened to load the previous Eclipse updates for the Sametime Gateway on your Sametime 7.5 CF1 server, then you get the following prompt that new code was added.  However, this isn't newer as they changed the numbering scheme (see image below)
• You are not prompted to change your geographic location for the new install and fill out you location information
• You users will appreciate the icon changing from Sametime Connect 7.5 to Sametime Connect (no version number listed).
• Privacy settings for different communities is still a single point and not set up to support the feature of logging into multiple communities
• It seems some people are getting two instances of the client when they install and click to Launch the client right away instead of closing the installer and then launching.

 

for this posting



On Wednesday, April 25th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

Problem

Java virtual machine (JVM) changes made to Domino 7.0.2 are causing nHTTP crashes.

Content

If you are running a Lotus® Sametime® server release 7.0 or 7.5 on Domino® release 7.0.2 you may experience nHTTP crashes.  These crashes do not occur in versions of Domino prior to 7.0.2. This issue is under investigation by Quality Engineering as SPR #TTRT6XBQPE.  Until a fix can be provided, the following workarounds are available.   Note that 7.0.2 FP1 does NOT fix this issue. Do not upgrade to Domino 7.0.2 (or later) on any Sametime servers running on Windows. or Revert to the JVM from an earlier Domino release. To do this, copy the \Lotus\Domino\JVM folder from a pre-Domino 7.0.2 installation and overwrite the same folder on your Domino 7.0.2 server.   Be sure to make a backup of the existing JVM folder before taking these steps. For Unix and Linux the JVM is located in /opt/ibm/lotus/notes/latest//jvm/ by default.

for this posting



On Tuesday, April 17th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

An excerpt from the pdf found

QUOTE FROM THE PDF

BlackBerry servers may crash unexpectedly when the server Name and Address Book (NAB) is upgraded to the new Notes/Domino 8 design or when users switch to the mail8 template. On your server console, you may see an error similar to the following:
Process E:\domino\nBES.EXE (4172/0x104C) has terminated abnormally
In addition, NSD may or may not activate. In either case, the BES task is not functioning, and BlackBerry users will be unable to receive mail.
Workaround Administrators should upgrade to the latest BES release that has Domino 8 support.

It's page 18 and 19.

Read the pdf right here

for this posting



On Monday, April 9th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

This should be interesting:

Brief Description
Microsoft Transporter Suite for Lotus Domino is used for interoperability and migration from Lotus Domino to Active Directory, Exchange Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.

Anyone tested the gold release yet?  You need the following installed also:

• MMC 3.0
• Windows Powershell 1.0
• Microsoft Exhange Server MAPI Client and Collaboration Data Objects 1.2.1

I will load them on the test machine and see what we get.

The Release Notes
The actual product page

for this posting



On Saturday, April 7th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

You can find it right here.

for this posting



On Saturday, April 7th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

If you are running Blackberry server version 4.0.x or something below 4.1.3 (so far in our testing) and then load the Notes 8 client or server and change your mail template you make the BES server go boom over and over and over.  We had a mail template modified to Domino 8 and then the BES 4.1.0 server hit it and it crashed continuously for some time until we found it.  Our internal server is 4.1.3 and we have had no issues with the Domino 8 templates.

However!  RIM states no support of Domino 8 in any fashion at this time so run at your own risk

for this posting



On Friday, April 6th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

I was just sitting here thinking about location awareness features in Sametime AOL it seems.  From the provider Skyhook comes a free plug-in for AOL to show location awareness of who is around you if enabled.

Mobile IM
AOL has released a location plug-in for its AIM messaging client. The plug-in, developed by Skyhook Wireless, allows AIM users to see where people on their buddy lists are physically located. Skyhook tracks locations by using the wireless pulses emitted by all Wi-Fi transmitters, including Wi-Fi-enabled computers. The AIM plug-in allows users to add a new "Near Me" group to their buddy lists. This group will show usernames of those AIM members who share their locations and are within a set distance. The plug-in, which is a free download, also enables users to see a buddy's location on a map as well. Currently this is available only for PC users - however Skyhook has said it expects to see the location capabilities eventually integrated with AIM clients on mobile phones.

Interesting twist as the race continues for IM domination...

for this posting



On Friday, March 23rd, 2007   by Chris Miller        

I was using the nice slide out calendar "Day At-A-Glance" part of the Standard client.  Now the usual day view was great but the Summary list gave an issue.  All was an hour off as shown in this image.  Plus no icons like the other view.

Hmmm, something is amiss here

for this posting



On Thursday, March 22nd, 2007   by Chris Miller        

Here is a screenshot of the new icons in the calendar entries.  It even shows if you were required or optional in the text which is a nice touch.


The users gets it, the users understand it and for gosh sakes they don't have to call me about icons

for this posting



On Thursday, March 22nd, 2007   by Chris Miller        

We have a customer with enormous amounts of disk usage on single Domino servers.  They started crashing recently.  After numerous talks and escalations with Lotus, sending of crash files numerous times per day as this progressed, they finally stated the stunning line.  Even though the IBM Performance Redbook for 7.0 talks about it, technotes (below #1233872 published this year) state it and IBM'ers have it in sessions, there is an underlying issue.

For example, with Win32, the default memory available to each Domino partition is 2 GB.  There is a switch to increase memory to 3 GB, but that solution has a performance impact of ~10% CPU utilization.  With Windows 2003 x64 Edition and Domino 7.0.1, this switch will not be needed and 3 GB will be supported by default.

So the issue is that with large data stores (this is over 2TB we are talking right now), the /3GB switch causes crashes.  While the internal IBM info is not published at this time, I hope it will show.  The funny thing is that this exact issue affects Exchange shops too as shown in this posting.  I found a warning on Ed's blog, under comment #8.

This led us to find out about the transaction logging issue with 7.0.1 so we are headed for 7.0.2 with no /3GB switch.  Let's see if we can get that new technote.

for this posting



On Tuesday, March 20th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

I had some clean-up to do since apparently beta 2 will upgrade fine over 7.x and 6.5.x versions but not beta 1 installs.  It kept running to about 80% and really wanted to find the .msi file for iTunes for some reason.  Those silly things drive me nuts.  I got around that eventually.

Well in the ReadMe file there is a section about uninstallation of the versions that cured my issue it seems.  Some loose files left over in the C drive, a folder in the old installed program directory and 2 registry deletions and I was on my way.  It launched fine, worked well (except the local NAB still) but crashed on the way closing.  I will reboot now that install is done and see how we fare.i

for this posting



On Monday, March 19th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

Seems we had crashes on 7.0.2 FP1 servers after this weekend and we discovered that proper crash information was not being collected.  Seems we all need a replacement for NSD from IBM to make it collect properly.  I would expect a technote and/or fix shortly...

for this posting



On Wednesday, March 14th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

Many of you know there is a few of us bloggers that use Plazes to show where we are or have been in the world.  You can see mine over on the right side of my blog.  Well, while in Germany, I found out about a partner that wrote a Sametime 7.5 plug-in that replaces the local Plazes program on your computer.  Supposedly, the newer one will even help set your location setting in the Sametime client.  No more typing at new sites!!  The screenshot looks like this:



So go and get it from Ebf.de or use the very simple site update they provide if you have trouble reading German.  You can use the site.xml for your client at the following:

http://ebfdus1.ebf.de/sameplace/site.xml

for this posting



On Wednesday, March 14th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

OK, so if you ran anything before the recent .7 version of the mailfile agent, it might appear that it went well and fine.  But odds are it did not get everything.  What we found, and confirmed on today's DST call is that the agent will process faster than the document collection can occur.

What this means is that while the agent completes, it might have skipped certain documents in the user's calendar.  Of course, this is totally random.  We found most mailfiles were good, but then some would have appointments that did and did not convert.  Running the new agent again against these mailfiles seemed to solve the issue.  WAS far as we can tell because there is not enough time to go through the properties of each entry and find the timezone values.

So good luck once again..

for this posting



On Wednesday, March 7th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

I came across an article stating how SpamKiller 4.x cannot read Lotus Notes generated emails in it's native format.  I took this to mean that it did not like encrypted mail messages.  So instead of passing it through it seems to totally strip the content of the email body from the message and send the header.

Now normally I would laugh and enjoy the humor.  However., there is a link on the McAfee site that takes you to a simple statement form them that they do not support Lotus Notes in it's native mail format, use POP3 and then it links to an Oct 1998 article on LDD about setting up local POP/SMTP accounts.

So I browsed their site and came across the product page which states it supports Lotus Notes and the other product.  SO I am guessing this article writer is pulling old data out to stir the pot since the link was for the R4 version of the product also.

for this posting



On Wednesday, March 7th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

If you were unaware of these I would get on them now.  The calls let everyone ask any question about the DST and you get to hear all the oddities people have.  One person today actually was removing the local cache.dsk for a few users that had a couple people that still couldn't see all times right and then and all was well.  Lotus hadn't heard of that one yet.  So bring your questions and get on the calls.  I am not sure how they generated the list to notify people either.  They have Scott Vrusho on the call as well as many others.  Humorously my last blog entry popped up on the call.

IBM is holding daily "Open Mic DST Calls".  These calls are intended to
provide a forum for our customers to bring their questions, concerns etc..
around DST to us!  Our goal is to provide them with the information they
need and to answer the questions that they have in order to ready their
systems and WPLC products for the DST changeover.

IBM has planned calls for Tuesday - Friday  (March 6th - 9th) and March
12th from 12:00pm - 1:00pm Eastern.

Tuesday 3/6 -
Conference Access:
Toll free:   1-888-732-6202
Toll:        1-719-457-1017
Participant Passcode:  893498

Wednesday 3/7
Conference Access:
Toll free:   800 214 0745
Toll:        +1 719 457 0700
Tie:         650-3309
Participant Passcode:  158121

Thursday 3/8
Conference Access:
Toll free:   1-888-373-5705
Toll:        1-719-457-3840
Tie:         650-3310
Participant Passcode:  547292

Friday 3/9
Conference Access:
Toll free:   1-866-237-3252
Toll:        1-719-457-1018
Tie:         650-2636
Participant Passcode:  163964

Also, the demo videos can be found here:

New Videos show sample scenario of applying DST change to Notes and Domino

New video instructions (screen capture with audio narration) have been provided. These videos demonstrate how a Notes calendar is impacted by the DST change and show one scenario of applying the necessary updates to allow for the new Daylight Saving Time definitions. The download link to the videos is embedded within the "C&S Agents" technote below.

Title: Agents for updating Calendaring and Scheduling entries and Resource Reservation entries for Daylight Saving Time (DST) 2007
URL: http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=463&uid=swg21254639#Demo%20Videos

In addition, a video has been created to demonstrate how to use the Java Time Zone Update (JTZU) tool for updating DST information in your Java Runtime Environment(s). The JTZU video can be accessed via the following updated technote:

Title: Using the IBM Time Zone Update Utility for Java (JTZU) with Lotus software products
URL: http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=463&uid=swg21249964

for this posting



On Tuesday, March 6th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

Yes it is reported to Lotus now, NO the new agent (.7) does not include this fix.  Apparently the Rooms and actual resources in the database have their own TimeZone field stored with them.  When you go to schedule a meeting and include a specific room or resource the freetime is off since the physical resource still has the old timezone information stored in it.  This was tossed into Domino some time ago to help show specific timezones for each resource that may be located in different places in one resource database. However, the new agent does not change the timezone as shown below.


You then go in an edit and resave the document (or run an agent to refresh them all) and you get the following.


Ignore the Adminp statement if you edit and resave.  It is the saving action that does it apparently.

for this posting



On Friday, March 2nd, 2007   by Chris Miller        

I had the podcast with Alan Lepofsky at Lotusphere2007 on his new role as evangelist for Lotus Connections as a starting point to this whole Lotus Connections thing.  Well today there was an IBM/business partner tech call for the product which I made sure I was available for.  We are getting interest in hosting this product for customers already and I wanted to see architecture and anything else I could grab.

The blog technology is based on open source for this, using the Roller technology.  This is an easy way to get users started but also the floodgates on information.  One of the speakers even stated this was not a highlight of what Connections has to offer.

Currently only ITDS and Active Directory 2003 are supported.  They are 'actively" looking at properly utilizing the Domino directory for the LDAP services.  This is something that was addressed during Q&A at the end.  Domino support is crucial to many enterprises that have based and aggregated themselves around a Domino directory choice.

There will be a pilot and production install options.  The pilot builds the required tables on DB2 for you and the WAS part is a very basic install with security needs.  Much like the Sametime Gateway base install.  All the services are installed for testing ability in the pilot mode.  Production will offer standalone or clustered services with the ability to include or not include parts of Lotus Connections.  Data preservation should be preserved if you move from pilot to production.  This is a great way for customers to get their feet wet

A slide was pushed on ITDI (IBM Tivoli Directory Integrator) abilities to allow enhanced profile support across data sources.  ITDI will be offered as a bundled part of Connections.  A good move on the part of IBM to allow a greater building of profiles from numerous data sources.  Such as a Domino directory for usernames with HR info on profiles.  Using some data mapping in XML you could build a nice table and hierarchy for profiles, including skillsets.

If you read my LUG Sys Admin newsletter I had some initial candid talk about Lotus Connections inside.  I would suggest popping over there for some beginning thoughts.

for this posting



On Wednesday, February 28th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

I said I would type this up so I went one better and recorded a mini podcast from the St Louis User Group meeting today where we talked about the DST changes we did at Connectria. I will compile that tonight and get that published.

But as a quick note, look for another new agent (4.0.2.7) to come out and fix some of the looping script errors we received on numerous servers while running the server based agent against the mailfiles.  We saw this on more than a few customers across versions of templates as well as Domino versions.  It drove us nuts, and wasted a lot of time to have to go into the text files and remove the offending user mailfile to get the agent to run on.  Until it encountered another one and looped again.  Now some ran without incident.  Others stopped more than 20 times on larger sites.

I also talk about the order we did things and across the product lines.

for this posting



On Tuesday, February 27th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

5:00am - Quick team meeting in my office to go over everything we need to get done.  Blackberry pushes and Sametime are first up on the list.

5:30am - So first up for me was the Sametime servers.  Others were prepping the DWA, calendar and RnR stuff.  I have some of those to do in a bit, but I started with our internal servers first.  Running the JTZU patch took far too long to search the Sametime systems.  You really cannot run this tool in interactive mode since then you need to specify what gets updated and you have no clue.  It even prompts you that letting it search could take hours.  It really only took a few minutes when all was said and done to find what needed updating.  It did take a while to run however.

6:16am - This was incredibly frustrating when the IBM support site was up and down all morning also.  Yes we have knowledgebase locally, but it is faster to web grab some of the files.  Also, it also would be nice not to get just random error messages on documents not existing when you know they do.

7:00am - First batch of RnR changes completed and one test mailfile set done.  One weird error on one customer and the rest went smooth so far.

8:00am - Script errors when the calendar agent runs on a bad mailfile in the text list.  We find endless script loops running.  Removing the last mailfile attempted (and all previous completed ones) from the text list and restarting the agent fixes it.  Some clients have no issues at all, others have a handful that cause grief.  It has you going back to each server and making sure it it not looping.

8:30am - The path for managed and hosted server is an issue, so we created numerous agents with different drive letters that we can fire off.  Now AS/400 and some random servers ever have different data paths from the norm.  Standardization I say, standardization.

8:50am - Encounter first Domino Directory in foreign language.  Script in agents only works on English views.  It says it can't find the Server\Mail Users view.  Which is there, however it is Servidor\Usuarios do Correio. First glance doesn't show where the agent grabs that view name to change it.

So I will give another (after much sleep) overview tomorrow on steps, commands and other things we figured out and streamlined as we went along to make your life easier.

for this posting



On Sunday, February 25th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

We are finishing the final prep for the big change this weekend and I came across a small section of the technote that stood out as a time saver as no one will be on the servers during the time we are patching.

1. To run as multiple instances (i.e., four instances), copy/paste the agent multiple times in the same database, and change the name to "AdminAgent1", "AdminAgent2" etc.
2. Ensure you have the server setup to run the desired number of concurrent agents in the Server document in the Domino Directory. The "Max concurrent agents" setting is found on the Server Tasks -> Agent Manager tab. Note: There are separate settings for "Daytime Parameters" and "Nighttime Parameters," make sure that you set each as desired.
3. Repeat steps 1-5 from the section above on configuring the agent to run in the background:
- in step 1, ensure that multiple TXT files are used to evenly divide the list of files to process
- in step 2 ensure the individual agents are edited to point to the individual TXT files
- in step 6, simply issue "Tell AMGR Run" for each of the individual copies of the agent:
i.e. for 4 agents it would be the following
Tell AMGR Run "mail\AgentDb.nsf" 'AdminAgent1'
Tell AMGR Run "mail\AgentDb.nsf" 'AdminAgent2'
Tell AMGR Run "mail\AgentDb.nsf" 'AdminAgent3'
Tell AMGR Run "mail\AgentDb.nsf" 'AdminAgent4'

So notice the key area about having enough Amgr threads defined to run all the instances you wish.

for this posting



On Friday, February 23rd, 2007   by Chris Miller        

So reading the technotes we have some gaps in what will transpire and in what order at most customer sites.  A lot of this relies on the ability, or timing, of getting the desktop operating system patched.  If you follow the simple step plan in technote #1254624 you will see that (1) the server OS gets patched, (2) then the Domino version (if possible), (3) the JTZU for Sametime servers or other Java dependent apps and then it gets fuzzy.

(4) is in relation to putting the OS patch on the clients.  For one thing, Lotus suggests that the Notes client is closed when the patch is applied.  How many of your users leave the client open all night long?

The computer should be restarted after the patch is applied and before restarting Notes.  If the computer is not restarted after installing the patch, Notes will return the old time zone information for time zones other than the current time zone.

A lot is riding on this client restart or even patching.  I am also not sure how you are forcing your users with machines at home or laptops to do it.  If you start scheduling meetings across the clients that do and do not have the OS patch, then you will get variances in what they see and how correct they are.

Now to toss in some confusion, (5) should be done as soon as possible in relation to the OS updates.  This is finely designed and choreographed dance folks.  The amount of errors that DWA users will get relies heavily on this.  See technote #1241063 for the alternative issues.  From simple error pop-ups to meetings getting scheduled in Greenwich Mean Time, I think we have a problem here.  There is no way to get all those DWA user machines.

(6) moves on to the RnR database and the users mailfiles.  Now, if the users have local replicas also, they should be grabbing the change agent through replication before you run it on the server too.  See technote #1254639.  The RnR Manager must be shut down when the agent runs, and you even get a prompt while running this from the database Action menu.  Note, you will be signing these agents with some id file that needs at least editor access to the RnR database.

I will have more info for you to follow this one as we finalize and formulate the plan to update servers globally, hopefully it helps.

for this posting



On Wednesday, February 21st, 2007   by Chris Miller        

As many of you know I am a music fiend and always looking at new ways to hear/listen/filter.  I have the local collection (way to big to hear it all) and also the Yahoo streaming with a custom channel.  Well I came across a site today that I found quite cool and a neat way to navigate moods/tempo/etc.

It was called Musicovery and I happened to stumble across it.  You can select year ranges/tempo/mood/genre and all of that in a sliding connected image that let's you choose paths.  There is like 18 genre's and then sub moods then a sliding bar for year coverage.

for this posting



On Saturday, February 3rd, 2007   by Chris Miller        

A customized Blogger search ability

I find it hard to see all the blogger sites at one time looking for content when we all do not tag the same way.  So I have 83 sites already listed (from my own links) and will take more and even volunteers for the Custom Search Engine on Google.  Alan L started one quite a few months ago but I think this has broader appeal.  Since we all do not use Technorati the same way, but wish to see who said what on a topic, this will search only the blog sites and not hear the noise from everywhere else

for this posting



On Friday, February 2nd, 2007   by Chris Miller        

Working with the product as much as I do I encounter some weird little nuances every so often.  Here is a couple for you to ponder and watch out for..

• The Clearinghouse works well for adding @aol.com and @company.com names and does not fare well with @aim.com names
• If you add someone to your buddylist with an alias it does not add the little fancy orange running dude next to their name and instead adds the globe.  This , of course, gives no indication that they are even an AOL person you added.  I need to try this with Google Talk and Yahoo in a few
  
  
  
  
  • If you add someone with an alias to your buddylist from @aol.com, you can never again see their online name from the UI.  You can go local into the buddylist file, but not from the client.

for this posting



On Wednesday, January 31st, 2007   by Chris Miller        

So I willingly placed the fixpack 1 onto the Sametime Gateway server this morning.  In a full 21 seconds flat of install time.  Now as for the install, I am not sure why this couldn't be wrapped into a simpler exe file or even something to use the Websphere Updater.  It required a nice long script to typo in with plenty of room for typographical errors to make you try and try again.

Much to my humor after it was installed, it destroyed the management screen changing the gateway section to portlet entries that would not launch as shown below.


So I went back in and uninstalled following the simple task of switching the word install for remove.  Another 21 seconds later and I am back in business, without Yahoo integration, but back in business.

initCleanupWorkDir:
   [delete] Deleting dir

initRemoveAdminPortlet:

remove-servicepack:

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 21 seconds

for this posting



On Monday, January 29th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

I was forwarded an interesting little email from one of the other admins here.  He had found a link inside the admin screens on the Barracuda 400 model for a Lotus Notes mail template.  Downloading it showed version 6.5.7 (which was weird) but looking at it, it was a change to the extended mail template.  The work was done by Thuridion, a California based company from searching and locating a press release on this very topic.

It was an interesting touch if we could move those deign elements into the Domino 7 template and provide a hook into the Barracuda natively from the user's mailfile.  Anyone have experience with this integrated template in production yet?

for this posting



On Thursday, January 4th, 2007   by Chris Miller        

I downloaded the deployment plug-in (not the source version yet) to test it out and see what help it could provide.  The first thing I noticed is that it unpacked into the wrong directory.  You are supposed to download the zip then unpack straight to the plug-in directory of the Sametime client.  It added an extra folder layer so I moved everything up to the root folder and it started working right away.  No big deal, just packaging.

From there I started manipulating the browser to use (a button to browse the local OS would be nice instead of having to figure out and type it in manually) and what search host.  I couldn't figure out how to use my Sametime custom search engine yet, but it worked well otherwise and you can change the name and play with some of the basic code to make a nice internal Intranet and specifically targeted search.  You could then deploy this to the right people for some good quick reference help.

Take a peek if you haven't.

for this posting



On Wednesday, January 3rd, 2007   by Chris Miller        

So I received an inbound chat to Sametime from an AOL person through the gateway.  This person was not on my list previously in Sametime as a buddy.  So while in the chat I clicked the Add icon and they were successfully listed in the right group.

However (isn't there always one of these with me), they showed with the custom icon for the community and not with the little AOL running man.  So I removed the username entirely from my buddylist, and then manually added a new contact from the buddylist window.  I choose external contact and add the AOL name and the AOL running man shows up just fine.

Bizarre and makes sense in a weird way, it is broke.

for this posting



On Friday, December 29th, 2006   by Chris Miller        

Do not look at these postings as whining or complaining, just things the users need to be aware of in usage in advance so they do not question you later.

I never looked until today, which I should have.  While running the Sametime Mobile client for Blackberry, you can see all your AOL and gTalk contacts just great.  However, when they see you through the gateway, they do not get the mobile icon like other Sametime users see.  This might be a limitation of the gateway itself, but users will notice, trust me.

So what you get is the standard online and status ability, just not client type indications.

for this posting



On Thursday, December 28th, 2006   by Chris Miller        

If you add a user from the Sametime Gateway with an alias name, such as IdoNotes@gmail dot com, but give it a friendly name such as Chris on GTalk, you can then never again see the email address you add.  I tried looking at Edit Nickname from the menu, but that only let's you change what you set, not see the address you added.  I saw nothing under the menu items either.  Yes, you could look at local XML, but for a user that will not fly.

So chalk this one to a 'feature request' I guess.

for this posting



On Tuesday, December 26th, 2006   by Chris Miller        

While performing an upgrade of version and hardware swap from dedicated to VMWare, I had one sticky issue for a client. We performed the whole upgrade remotely, no reason to be sitting there for this one.

Here is the issue.  After loading 7.0.2 in the new VMWare, we shut down the old 6.5.3 server and began the simple mailfile and few database copies.  We brought the server up under the old name and started seeing countless lines of the different tasks with the same error message

"cache entry not found"

No maintenance or convert task would fix it.  Convert, Fixup, compact, index all failed with the same error.  Yes, all of them.

Now I searched Knowledgebase and online to limited success.  The Sched task, RnRMgr and HTTP were all reporting this same error.  Well with numerous tweaks to the Google search, I finally found some insight. The customer had moved to a single copy template (SCT) for the DWA 6 infrastructure.  When the databases were moved over, the SCT templates in use were not.  I simply moved those over and the server came right up with the error removed.  Convert then ran successfully to move them to DWA7 and then compact to reclaim much of the unused diskspace.

Issue solved and into the books for another oddity of undocumented weirdness.

for this posting



On Monday, December 18th, 2006   by Chris Miller        

I have a public group from our corporate directory.  Not a large one, maybe 40 people.  I can talk to most everyone just fine while using Sametime Mobile on the Blackberry 8703e.  However, there is one person I go to talk to and it throws the following screenshot error.  I wonder if it has to do with chat history

for this posting



On Thursday, December 14th, 2006   by Chris Miller        

AOL is now connected fully and NULL errors seem to have vanished with much tweaking and un quietly announced patches.  Google Talk went live today and seems to work fine, it prompted me for the authorization to add awareness and to my buddylist, I am still waiting on the green light however.

I am getting lot of IM's and a few emails over setting this up and I hope to have a nice document shortly to answer those burning questions for all of you

for this posting



On Thursday, December 7th, 2006   by Chris Miller        

I had the pleasure of sitting with Andy and Rob of Technotics, Susan Bulloch of IBM for a four person panel BOF to answer whatever questions they had across all areas.  This is what we had to cover (minus a couple):

• how to deep fry a turkey
• change users SMTP domain name across 17 acquired companies
• whitelisting servers
• Sametime error codes for users dropping connectivity
• set update flag in local address book
• multi language notes clients?
• strip attachments from NDR's?
• port failover in a clustered server - teaming NIC cards as solution at hardware level
• migration of domains by moving everyone into the new domain and then recertifying
• server_transinfo_range  proper setting?
• Nomad questions on the uninstall/U3 and performance speed issues on USB

for this posting



On Thursday, November 30th, 2006   by Chris Miller        

As we fired up a new customer server remotely over in China, it had terrible bandwidth and connection issues.  It could telnet to the Notes port on the US based Domino server, see the server in DNS and IP, but when Notes popped up it had the worst time trying to connect and would time out too fast.

So there is a couple ways to handle this.  As commented before, there is no documentation of what format or data should be included for the setup selection of choosing local media.  We have played around with it to some success, but it should be much cleaner.  So we copied down the names.nsf, admin4.nsf and the notes.ini from a freshly installed and working server.  A quick change of the id file and paths and the server came right up.  You could note the CleanSetup=1 in the notes.ini but I wanted everything built, not just to tell it that the setup.nsf database was placed and removed.

You used to be able to create profiles, pre-configured in the setup.nsf database and place that on numerous servers.  it doesn't like that in the newer code streams.

for this posting



On Thursday, November 23rd, 2006   by Chris Miller        

I hesitated last time to talk about site.xml and feature updates.  They snuck a fix into the RTC Gateway installer that you need to apply to your clients again to get Yahoo and Google to work correctly.  This is something that will frustrate you if not done in advance.

This is exactly what should have been done for the CF1 patch that came out, but now you have it.  I would either read more on how to configure or build the site.xml, including all formatting or I see there is a session on it at Lotusphere in using your Domino server to push and become a site update server for your Eclipse updates.

for this posting



On Monday, November 20th, 2006   by Chris Miller        

I had to gather my thoughts on it with all the pings/emails/podcasting and such.  With much discussion about why they picked WebSphere, will it ever run on Domino, why does it require so much hardware out there, we need to focus on the real issue, installation and deployment.  We can blow that smoke till we are blue (bad choice of colors with IBM involved) in the face.  Currently, there is no talks of any other path for RTC than what you see.  It takes whatever hardware it takes.  Now, I am not saying I agree here either.  This area is not the topic of the debate at the moment.  But more like how do we get this thing running?  So I started compiling a checklist.  Not of the step by step, I worked enough helping build those during the beta and they are documented now.  But more of key items to consider and this you should/shouldn't do.  Off we go on revision 1 below.  It was too big to leave on the main page in entirety.  Just click the Read More that is to follow and you get the info on the following:

• Installation
• Security
• Management

Continue Reading here" So let's talk RTC Gateway" »

for this posting



On Friday, November 17th, 2006   by Chris Miller